StackBest hosting & infrastructure for solo founders
Hosting is usually a solo founder's first recurring bill, and the price you see on the landing page is rarely the price you pay six months in. Serverless platforms charge per seat plus usage overages, while raw VPS providers charge a flat fee but hand you the ops work. This comparison covers what each option really costs in 2026, where the overage traps are, and when a $6 VPS beats a $20 platform.
| Tool | Free tier | Paid from | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
 Vercel$20/user/mo | $20/user/mo | Next.js founders who ship fast, stay under moderate traffic, and value zero DevOps | |
 Netlify$9/mo | $9/mo | Founders running mostly-static marketing sites or docs who want a cheap $9 paid tier | |
 Railway$5/mo | $5/mo | Founders who want Heroku-style simplicity for a small backend plus Postgres under ~$10/mo | |
 Fly.iousage-based from ~$2.02/mo | usage-based from ~$2.02/mo | Founders comfortable with Docker who want cheap always-on VMs and cheap egress | |
 Render$7/mo | $7/mo | Founders who want Heroku's simplicity with a predictable $7-25/mo bill | |
 Cloudflare Workers & Pages$5/mo | $5/mo | Founders whose app fits the Workers model and who never want a bandwidth bill | |
 Hetzner CloudEUR 5.49/mo | EUR 5.49/mo | Founders who know Linux basics and want maximum compute per euro | |
 DigitalOcean$4/mo | $4/mo | Founders who want a VPS with polished tooling, US regions, and great docs over the absolute lowest price |
Start on Vercel Hobby (free) while pre-revenue, and move to a paid plan the day you charge customers: Vercel Pro at $20/mo if you live in Next.js, or Cloudflare Workers at $5/mo if your app fits the Workers model and you want zero bandwidth risk. Add Railway Hobby ($5/mo) or Render Starter ($7/mo) when you need an always-on backend or cron jobs next to a database.
Once your monthly hosting bill passes roughly $30-40 or overages appear, a Hetzner CX23 (~$6/mo, 4 GB RAM, 20 TB traffic) with Coolify replaces most of it, at the cost of doing your own ops. Realistic solo budget: $0-9/mo pre-revenue, $12-27/mo once live, with the VPS switch as your scale-stage cost ceiling.
VercelDefault pickFree tierAsk about these tools
The fine print, tool by tool
Vercel$20/user/mo+
Vercel is the hosting platform built by the makers of Next.js, where pushing to git deploys your app in about a minute. A solo founder picks it when they build in Next.js and would rather pay $20 a month than think about servers at all.
$20/user/mo (Pro)
Hobby: 100 GB fast data transfer, 1M edge requests, 1M function invocations, 4 CPU-hours of functions per month. Non-commercial use only, 1 seat, hard caps with no way to buy extra usage.
Pro is $20 per seat plus usage; the $20 usage credit only covers roughly 130 GB of extra bandwidth at $0.15/GB. Function Active CPU bills at $0.128/hour. Watch Image Transformations at $0.05 per 1K, a common silent line item for image-heavy sites. Default $200 spend limit caps surprise bills.
- + Best-in-class Next.js deploys: git push to live in about a minute with zero config
- + Pro includes a $20 monthly usage credit, so light production apps often stay at exactly $20
- + Preview deployments for every branch are free and automatic
- − Hobby tier bans commercial use, so the day you charge customers you owe $20/mo
- − Bandwidth overage is $0.15/GB, roughly 7x Fly.io's $0.02/GB; 500 GB extra costs $75
Netlify$9/mo+
Netlify hosts static and Jamstack sites with forms, redirects, and deploy previews included, billed through a single pool of monthly credits. A solo founder picks it for a marketing site or docs when they want the cheapest paid tier among the big serverless platforms.
$9/mo (Personal, 1,000 credits)
Free plan with 300 credits/mo. At 20 credits per GB of bandwidth and 15 credits per production deploy, that is roughly 15 GB of bandwidth OR 20 deploys, shared across everything you do.
The credit system is the trap: bandwidth, deploys, compute, and web requests all pull from one pool, so a deploy-often workflow competes with your traffic budget. Effective bandwidth cost (~$0.13/GB) is near Vercel's, not near a VPS. Free tier suspends when credits run out mid-month unless you pay.
- + Personal plan at $9/mo is the cheapest paid serverless tier among the big platforms
- + Pro at $20/mo includes unlimited team members, no per-seat math
- + Credit packs ($5 for 500 on Personal) let you top up without jumping a whole tier
- − Credit system obscures real limits: bandwidth costs 20 credits/GB (~$0.13/GB), so the free 300 credits can vanish in 15 GB of traffic
- − Every production deploy burns 15 credits, so shipping 10 times a day eats your allowance even with zero visitors
Railway$5/mo+
Railway runs backends, databases, and cron jobs from a Dockerfile or repo with per-second usage billing, in the style Heroku made familiar. A solo founder picks it when they need a small always-on API plus Postgres for under $10 a month without touching a server.
$5/mo (Hobby, includes $5 usage)
The $5 Hobby fee doubles as a usage credit, so tiny services are effectively flat-rate. Costs scale linearly with provisioned-and-used RAM/CPU, so it gets expensive precisely when your app grows; budget around $30/GB-RAM-plus-vCPU for always-on workloads. Pro is $20 per seat for higher limits and longer log retention.
- + Hobby at $5/mo with $5 usage included is the cheapest way to run a real backend with a database on a managed platform
- + Per-second billing on actual usage: a small API sleeping at 100 MB RAM costs about $1/mo in RAM
- + Egress at $0.05/GB is a third of Vercel's and Render's $0.15/GB
- − RAM at $10/GB/mo and vCPU at $20/mo add up: one always-on 2 GB, 1 vCPU service is about $40/mo, far above a $6 Hetzner box with 4 GB
- − No free tier at all after the one-time $5 trial credit, and a memory leak literally costs money until you notice it
Fly.iousage-based from ~$2.02/mo+
Fly.io runs your Docker containers as tiny VMs in 35 regions, billed per second, with the cheapest egress of any managed platform. A solo founder picks it when they are comfortable with Docker and want an always-on server for a couple of dollars a month.
usage-based from ~$2.02/mo (shared-cpu-1x, 256 MB)
Billed per second on machine size. RAM beyond bundled amounts is about $5/GB/mo, volumes $0.15/GB/mo, dedicated IPv4 $2/mo per app. Africa/India egress is $0.12/GB, 6x the US/EU rate, if your audience is there. Prices vary by region with markup multipliers; machine reservations give a 40% discount.
- + Cheapest real always-on VM on a managed platform: shared-cpu-1x with 256 MB is about $2/mo
- + Egress at $0.02/GB in North America and Europe is the lowest of any platform here
- + Machines stop and start in milliseconds, so scale-to-zero setups can cost under $1/mo
- − No free tier for new signups, and support beyond community costs $29/mo
- − DIY vibe: no managed Postgres worth relying on, so you pair it with Supabase or Neon anyway, and debugging failed deploys eats solo-founder hours
Render$7/mo+
Render hosts web services, cron jobs, and managed Postgres with a setup experience close to what Heroku used to offer. A solo founder picks it when they want a full-stack app with a database on a predictable flat bill of $7 to $25 a month.
$7/mo (Starter instance) on a free Hobby workspace
Hobby workspace: 750 free instance hours/mo, but free web services spin down after 15 minutes idle and take about a minute to wake. Free Postgres is 1 GB and self-destructs 30 days after creation. New plans include only 5 GB bandwidth.
Two bills to watch: the workspace plan (Hobby free, Pro $25/mo flat) and per-instance compute ($7/mo Starter and up). The 2026 repricing traded seat fees for slashed included bandwidth, so a 50 GB/mo site on Hobby now pays about $6.75 in overages. Legacy workspaces are auto-migrated to new plans on August 1, 2026. Extra custom domains are $0.25/mo each beyond 2 on Hobby.
- + Clean Heroku-like experience: web services, cron jobs, and managed Postgres with zero config
- + $7/mo Starter instance removes cold starts, cheaper than Railway for a steady 512 MB service
- + 2026 plan change made Pro a flat $25/mo with unlimited team members, no seat fees
- − Free Postgres expires after 30 days, then deletes after a 14-day grace period, a nasty surprise for side projects
- − New Hobby plan includes just 5 GB bandwidth (down from 100 GB on legacy), with overage at $0.15/GB
Cloudflare Workers & Pages$5/mo+
Cloudflare Workers runs your code on Cloudflare's edge network and never charges for bandwidth, with static assets free at any scale. A solo founder picks it when their app fits the Workers runtime and they want a $5 flat bill that a traffic spike cannot blow up.
$5/mo (Workers Paid)
100,000 requests/day with 10 ms CPU per invocation. Static assets are free and unlimited. No egress charges ever.
Cheapest serious platform here: $5/mo flat covers most solo workloads, and the free-egress policy removes the classic viral-spike bill. Overages are tiny: $0.30 per extra million requests, $0.02 per extra million CPU-ms. Budget the add-ons separately (R2 storage $0.015/GB/mo, D1, KV) since the $5 covers compute only.
- + Zero bandwidth charges at any scale, the only platform here with truly free egress
- + $5/mo includes 10M requests and 30M CPU-ms, enough for most solo-founder APIs
- + Free tier's 100k requests/day comfortably serves a production app's API, with static assets unlimited
- − Workers runtime is not Node.js: some npm packages and long-running jobs (10 ms CPU cap on free) simply do not fit, and full-stack Next.js via OpenNext still has rough edges
- − Storage is a la carte: R2, KV, D1, and Durable Objects each have separate pricing you must add up
Hetzner CloudEUR 5.49/mo+
Hetzner sells plain virtual servers out of German, Finnish, and US data centers at prices no managed platform comes close to. A solo founder picks it when they can handle basic Linux ops and want to run their whole stack on one $6 box instead of paying $40 for the same specs elsewhere.
EUR 5.49/mo (~$6) for CX23: 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe
Prices exclude VAT (EU customers add ~19-25%). IPv4 bills ~EUR 0.50/mo even when the server is off. The cheapest CX line is Germany/Finland only; US locations use pricier CPX plans with far less included traffic. Existing servers keep old pricing until you resize. Pair with free Coolify for a Vercel-like workflow at a tenth the cost.
- + Unmatched raw value: about EUR 5.49/mo buys 4 GB RAM and 2 vCPU, versus roughly $40/mo for similar always-on specs on Railway
- + 20 TB of traffic included on EU servers, hundreds of times the platform allowances
- + Per-hour billing and no contract, so experiments cost cents; one CX23 can run your whole stack via Coolify or Dokploy
- − You are the ops team: security patches, backups, SSL, and 3 AM outages are all yours, with no managed database or git-push deploys out of the box
- − June 15, 2026 price adjustment raised cloud prices roughly 30-50% on new orders and rescales, ending the era of locked-low prices
DigitalOcean$4/mo+
DigitalOcean rents flat-priced virtual servers with the best tutorial library in the VPS space, plus managed databases and an app platform when you outgrow the basics. A solo founder picks it over Hetzner when they want US regions and mature tooling and will trade some price-performance for it.
$4/mo (Basic Droplet: 512 MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10 GB SSD)
The $4 droplet is a teaser; realistic app hosting starts at the $6-12/mo tiers. Transfer pools across droplets and overage is only ~$0.01/GB, so bandwidth is a non-issue. Per-second billing capped at the monthly rate. Watch the paid backup add-on and $15+/mo managed database, which quietly triple a 'cheap' setup.
- + Predictable flat pricing: $4-6/mo droplets with 500 GB transfer included, no usage surprises
- + Bandwidth overage is about $0.01/GB, 15x cheaper than Vercel or Render overages
- + Best documentation and tutorial library in the VPS space, a real time-saver when solo
- − Weaker price-performance than Hetzner: $4 buys 512 MB RAM versus Hetzner's 4 GB for ~$6, and 512 MB is too small for most Node or Rails apps plus a database
- − Managed extras add up: managed Postgres starts around $15/mo and backups cost 20-30% of droplet price, tripling a small stack's bill
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