Fly.io Pricing: Machine Cost, Volumes and Bandwidth

Fly.io does not sell plans. There is no Hobby tier, no Pro tier and, since the old free allowance ended, no free tier either. What you get instead is a trial worth 2 machine hours or 7 days, and after that every resource is metered separately and lands on one monthly invoice. That makes Fly.io unusually honest and unusually hard to budget, because there is no plan name to point at when someone asks what it costs.

This page works the arithmetic. Every rate below was read off fly.io on 31 August 2026, and the machine prices are quoted for the Amsterdam region, because Fly.io prices compute per region and there is no single global number to quote.

How much does Fly.io cost per month?

A single small app on Fly.io costs about $2 to $3 a month, a normal production web app lands near $50 to $60, and a two region app with a database and paid support runs close to $190. The floor is low because machines bill per second and a shared-cpu-1x with 256 MB is $0.0028 an hour, which is $2.02 if it never stops at all.

The ceiling is set by three things: how many machines you keep running, how much persistent volume you provision, and where your users are. Egress in North America and Europe is $0.02 per GB, but Africa and India are $0.12 per GB, six times the price for the same bytes.

Additional RAM beyond a preset costs roughly $5 per 30 days per gigabyte, and that too varies by region. If a machine is stopped rather than destroyed you still pay for its root filesystem, at $0.15 per gigabyte for 30 days, which is the line people forget when they scale to zero and wonder why the invoice is not zero.

Does Fly.io have a free tier?

No. Fly.io retired its free allowance and now offers a trial of 2 machine hours or 7 days, whichever you reach first. After that everything is billed. This is a real change from the platform's reputation, and it is the single most common reason developers arrive at a comparison page looking for somewhere else to put a small app.

There are still a few genuinely free lines inside a paid account. Inbound bandwidth is free, the first 10 GB of volume snapshots each month are free, and every organization gets its first 10 single hostname SSL certificates free. None of those add up to a free app, but they do mean a small bill stays small.

What are Fly.io volumes and egress priced at?

Persistent volumes are $0.15 per GB per month of provisioned capacity, and the words "provisioned capacity" matter: you pay for the size you asked for, not the bytes you wrote. A 100 GB volume that holds 4 GB of data still costs $15 a month. Snapshots are $0.08 per GB per month with the first 10 GB free.

Compare that volume rate with an ordinary cloud server, where 80 GB of SSD is bundled into a $24 droplet rather than billed at $12 on its own, and you can see where the Fly.io model gets expensive. Metered storage is excellent when you need 3 GB and terrible when you need 500 GB.

Three worked Fly.io bills

Rate cards are easier to argue with than invoices, so here are three realistic monthly bills built entirely from the published rates. Each assumes machines run continuously, which is the pessimistic case, because per second billing means anything that auto stops overnight costs less.

The pattern that shows up in all three is that compute dominates. Volumes and egress are rounding errors until you are serving hundreds of gigabytes or storing hundreds of gigabytes, and the machine count is what actually decides the number at the bottom.

How do Fly.io reservations work?

Fly.io offers a 40 percent discount when you reserve a block of compute time up front. The published examples are $144 a year for $20 a month of performance usage, and $36 a year for $5 a month of shared usage. In both cases you are prepaying twelve months of a committed spend level and receiving roughly twenty months of value against the on demand rate.

That is a genuinely good deal if your baseline load is predictable, and a trap if it is not, because a reservation is a floor rather than a cap. The reasonable approach is to reserve the compute you know you will burn every month regardless, and let the spiky part bill on demand at full rate.

Does Fly.io charge for Postgres?

Fly.io's pricing page does not publish a rate for Managed Postgres, referring instead to separate documentation, so treat any specific figure you see quoted elsewhere as unverified. What you can price honestly is the do it yourself version: a Postgres machine is just a machine plus a volume, so a performance-1x with 2 GB of RAM and a 40 GB volume is $32.19 plus $6.00, about $38 a month before backups and before a replica.

A high availability pair doubles the compute and the storage, which is how a database that felt cheap in staging becomes the largest line on a production invoice. Whichever way you run it, the database usually outlives the platform decision, and teams who want to ask that Postgres questions without writing SQL every time often bolt on a plain English data analyst rather than building an internal reporting layer from scratch.

When does a flat rate server cost less than Fly.io?

Roughly when your app stops being small and starts being steady. Fly.io's per second billing is genuinely excellent for workloads that scale to zero, run in short bursts, or need to sit in five regions at once. It is poor value for the ordinary case of an app that runs 24 hours a day in one place, because you are paying a premium for elasticity you never use.

The crossover is easy to spot on the numbers above. The production web app bill of about $56 a month buys two shared-cpu-4x machines with 4 GB of RAM each and 20 GB of storage. The same $48 buys a single 8 GB, 4 vCPU server with 160 GB of SSD and 5 TB of transfer on a mainstream cloud, and the transfer alone would cost $100 at Fly.io's North American egress rate. If your traffic is predictable and regional, the flat rate wins and it is not close.

What the flat rate does not include is the automation Fly.io gives you free: build, release, health check, roll forward, roll back. That work does not disappear when you move, it moves to you. It is the reason people stay on a platform they have outgrown, and it is exactly the gap a server management panel fills, by provisioning the box, wiring TLS and the firewall, and shipping releases with zero downtime deploys and one click rollback from a git push.

Fly.io against the other platform rate cards

Fly.io sits at the metered end of a spectrum. At the other end are platforms that sell you a plan and include allowances inside it. If you are costing a migration, the useful exercise is to price the same workload on two or three of them rather than reading one pricing page in isolation.

For the same app, our Vercel pricing breakdown covers a seat based model at $20 per developer with usage credits, Netlify pricing covers a credit model priced per team rather than per seat, Heroku pricing covers the dyno ladder, and Supabase pricing covers the case where the database rather than the web tier is the expensive half. The Vercel versus Netlify comparison works the same arithmetic across two of them side by side.

The short version

Fly.io is cheap to start, fair in the middle and expensive at the edges, in both senses of the word. There is no free tier, machines bill per second from $0.0028 an hour, volumes are $0.15 per GB of provisioned capacity, egress runs $0.02 to $0.12 per GB depending on where your users live, and reserving compute saves 40 percent if your baseline is predictable.

Price your own workload from the tables above rather than from a headline. If the answer is a small number and your app scales to zero, stay. If the answer is a steady three figure invoice for one region, a managed VPS at a flat monthly rate does the same job for less, provided you have something automating the deploys.