Netlify
Cheapest plan not known to forbid this: Free: $0Free: $0Free: $0
Credits, not bandwidth, are the limit: 300 on Free, 1,000 on Personal, 3,000+ on Pro. Enterprise is custom-priced; Netlify publishes no figure for it.
Vercel alternatives
Vercel: Any site that earns money, including through ads, must be on Pro, so the real first step is $0 to $20 a month. Here are the other hosting platforms we track (9 so far), each with its own steps.
Render
Cheapest plan not known to forbid this: Hobby: $0Hobby: $0Hobby: $0
Workspace fee steps $0, $25, $499 a month before any compute is billed. Free instances are not for production applications, per Render’s docs — its terms set no personal-use limit.
Railway
Cheapest plan not known to forbid this: Free trial: $0Free trial: $0Free trial: $0
The fee is also usage credit: $5 or $20 a month buys the same amount of usage; going past it bills extra.
Cloudflare Pages
Cheapest plan not known to forbid this: Free: $0Free: $0Pro: $20/mo (first step)
Builds step 500, 5,000, 20,000 by plan. Pro is $20 a month and Business $200, both billed annually; bandwidth is unlimited on every plan.
Heroku
Cheapest plan not known to forbid this: Eco: $5/moEco: $5/moEco: $5/mo
No free tier since 28 November 2022. The cheapest dyno is $5 a month and sleeps; the cheapest always-on dyno is $7. Postgres adds from $5 a month.
Fly.io
Cheapest plan not known to forbid this: Trial: $0Trial: $0Trial: $0
No plan fee and no free tier. A 256 MB Machine running all month is $2.19 in the cheapest regions, and a bill under $5 is waived — so one small Machine is effectively free, but nothing is included.
DigitalOcean App Platform
Cheapest plan not known to forbid this: Static: $0Static: $0Static: $0
Static sites are free (3 apps, 1 GiB outbound each). The first paid container is $5 a month; dedicated CPUs start at $29. Billed per container, per second.
Strapi
Cheapest plan not known to forbid this: Starter: $35/moStarter: $35/moStarter: $35/mo
Strapi Cloud starts at $35 a month per project and sleeps when idle; always-on starts at $90. The self-hosted Community edition is free under the MIT licence.
Cloudflare Workers
Cheapest plan not known to forbid this: Free: $0Free: $0Paid: $5/mo (first step)
Free to Paid is +$5 a month, and the $5 buys 10M requests a month. There is no charge for data transfer.
Pick a use. Plans the vendor’s own terms forbid for it turn grey and dashed. “Unknown” means we have not found a restriction in the page we read, not that none exists. Heights use a square-root scale so $5 and $599 both show.
| Platform | Plan | Base fee | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Netlify | Free | $0 | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Netlify | Personal | $9/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Netlify | Pro | $20/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Netlify | Enterprise | not captured | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Render | Hobby | $0 | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Render | Pro | $25/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Render | Scale | $499/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Railway | Free trial | $0 | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Railway | Hobby | $5/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Railway | Pro | $20/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Cloudflare Pages | Free | $0 | restricted (payments) |
| Cloudflare Pages | Pro | $20/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Cloudflare Pages | Business | $200/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Heroku | Eco | $5/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Heroku | Basic | $7/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Heroku | Standard-1X | $25/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Heroku | Standard-2X | $50/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Heroku | Performance-M | $250/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Heroku | Performance-L | $500/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Fly.io | Trial | $0 | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Fly.io | Pay as you go | metered | no restriction found on the page we read |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | Static | $0 | no restriction found on the page we read |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | Shared 512 MB | $5/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | Shared 1 GB (fixed) | $10/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | Shared 1 GB | $12/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | Shared 2 GB | $25/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | Dedicated 512 MB | $29/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | Shared 4 GB | $50/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Strapi | Starter | $35/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Strapi | Pro | $90/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Strapi | Business | $450/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Strapi | Enterprise | not captured | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Cloudflare Workers | Free | $0 | restricted (payments) |
| Cloudflare Workers | Paid | $5/mo | no restriction found on the page we read |
| Cloudflare Workers | Enterprise | not captured | no restriction found on the page we read |
Not a recommendation: features differ. This page prices only the steps. Vercel details.
Up to 3 sponsored cards per page, always labelled Sponsored, never ranked. First 20 vendors: 30 days free. Planned prices & waitlist