Fly.io Pricing 2026: What It Actually Costs

Short answer: Fly.io has no free tier and no monthly platform fee in 2026 — you pay by the second for what you run, from $2.19/month for the smallest always-on Machine. New organizations get a trial of up to 2 hours of Machine runtime or 7 days, whichever comes first, and need a credit card after that. Fly sold plans (Hobby, Launch, Scale) until October 7, 2024 and no longer does. Fly's own example of a small web app with Managed Postgres comes to $43.67/month, and Managed Postgres is most of that bill.

TL;DR: The cheapest always-on app is a shared-cpu-1x Machine with 256MB RAM at $2.19/month in Ashburn (iad) or Secaucus (ewr). Volumes are $0.15/GB/month, outbound data is $0.02/GB in North America and Europe, and Managed Postgres starts at $38/month. There is no free allowance for new organizations and no spending cap by default. Machines that auto-stop when idle are billed only while running, plus $0.15/GB/month of root filesystem while stopped.

Verified October 2026 against Fly.io's resource pricing, free trial, and discontinued plans pages. Prices vary by region and change; check the source before budgeting.

Does Fly.io Have a Free Tier?

No. New organizations have no free tier and no monthly free allowance. What they get is a trial:

The trial needs no credit card, but when it ends your apps stop until you add one, and adding a card ends the trial immediately. Some things stay free afterward: the first 10GB of volume snapshot storage each month, the first 10 single-hostname SSL certificates, inbound data transfer, and shared IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

What happened to the old plans? Fly stopped selling Hobby ($5/month), Launch, and Scale to new customers on October 7, 2024. Organizations that bought them before that date keep them, along with the free allowances those plans included (up to 3 shared-cpu-1x 256MB VMs, 3GB of volume storage, and a data-transfer allowance). If a pricing page still tells you Hobby is the entry point, it is out of date.

How Much Does Fly.io Cost?

These are the common line items for Ashburn (iad) and Secaucus (ewr), Fly's cheapest regions. Machine prices assume 30 days of continuous runtime.

Machines are billed by the second while running. A 31-day month costs slightly more than the 30-day figures above, and regions other than iad and ewr cost more. Frankfurt, for example, is $7.73 for the 1GB Machine that costs $6.70 in Ashburn.

Reservation blocks cut compute by 40% if you commit up front: $144/year buys $20/month of performance-Machine credit, and $36/year buys $5/month of shared-Machine credit. The credit does not roll over and applies only to CPU and extra RAM.

Fly.io Machine Pricing

The Machine is the main line item. Fly sells two CPU types, shared and performance, and the price gap is large: a 2GB shared-cpu-2x is $13.39/month against $33.00 for a 2GB performance-1x (see Fly's CPU performance docs for how they differ). The smallest sizes are enough for a bot or a low-traffic service, and a 1GB Machine at $6.70 is a reasonable floor for a small web app. Extra RAM is $6/GB/month, so a shared-cpu-1x with 2GB comes to about $12.70 — the $6.70 1GB size plus 1GB of extra RAM — which undercuts the $13.39 shared-cpu-2x with the same RAM if you don't need the second CPU.

Fly.io Managed Postgres Pricing

Managed Postgres runs from $38/month for Basic to $1,922/month for Performance, with storage at $0.28/GB/month on top. It includes automatic backups, high availability with automatic failover, and 24/7 support. Fly lists security patches and version upgrades as still under development. It runs only in some regions. Fly's older, self-managed Fly Postgres is unmanaged, so you handle failovers yourself.

Fly.io Redis Pricing

Fly points to Upstash for Redis, billed at the provider's list price rather than Fly's. Object storage works the same way through Tigris. Neither shows up on a Fly invoice at Fly's rates.

What Do Typical Apps Cost on Fly.io?

Fly publishes three worked examples, all in Ashburn and all running continuously:

The first shows how cheap Fly gets at the small end. The third shows where the bill goes once there is a database: the app and its volume cost $5.19, and Managed Postgres is the rest.

What Does a Production Fly.io Stack Cost With Observability?

Fly's platform bill covers compute, storage, and network. It does not cover error tracking, web analytics, or session replay. Fly provides logs, live tail, log search and export, metrics, and a documented Sentry integration, and the rest comes from separate vendors:

Redis, if you need it, comes on top of that.

When Is Fly.io the Right Choice?

• Containers near users. Fly runs in 17 regions — Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, Dallas, Secaucus, Frankfurt, São Paulo, Ashburn, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Chicago, Singapore, San Jose, Sydney, and Toronto — behind a global Anycast network. One VPS cannot do that.
• Bursty or low-traffic apps. Machines can auto-stop when idle, so you pay for running time plus a small rootfs charge, not for idle capacity.
• A managed Postgres you don't operate, with failover included.

Where the model turns against you: a steady production workload with a database, anything that sends a lot of data out, and anything where you need a predictable monthly number. The bill follows what you run, where, and how much traffic leaves, and every extra dimension is billed separately.

The Self-Hosted Comparison

A VPS is the opposite trade: a flat monthly price for fixed capacity, whether you use it or not. For a steady app with a database, that usually comes out below Fly's usage-based total, and it removes the per-region and per-gigabyte line items.

Temps is the self-hosted platform for that case. It is a single Rust binary, dual MIT / Apache 2.0, that deploys on every git push with no Dockerfile or CI wiring, and bundles managed PostgreSQL and Redis, preview environments, Sentry-compatible error tracking, privacy-first analytics, session replay, and uptime monitoring. It is free to self-host; the only cost is your own server. (Temps Cloud, a hosted control plane for your own servers, is coming soon from $29/month.)

The trade, stated plainly: you operate the server, patch it, and own its uptime, and you have fixed capacity rather than Fly's regions and scale-to-idle. For a side-by-side with the full feature list, see Temps vs Fly.io.

Migrating From Fly.io

Fly.io apps are standard container images, so Dockerfile-based apps deploy on Temps unchanged. Databases move with pg_dump and restore, Redis with DUMP and RESTORE, and volumes need to be copied over manually because they are tied to a Fly region. One thing to plan for: Fly secrets are write-only. Fly's documentation says its API servers can encrypt secrets but cannot decrypt them, so you cannot export values from Fly. Re-enter them from your own records, and keep the Fly app running until you have verified the new deployment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Fly.io have a free tier in 2026?

No. New Fly.io organizations have no free tier and no monthly allowance. They get a trial of up to 2 hours of Machine runtime or 7 days, whichever comes first, and need a credit card after that. Fly stopped selling plans and free allowances on October 7, 2024.

How much does Fly.io cost per month?

There is no monthly platform fee — you pay for what you use. The smallest always-on Machine is $2.19/month, Managed Postgres starts at $38/month, volumes are $0.15/GB/month, and outbound data is $0.02/GB in North America and Europe. Fly's own example of a small web app with Managed Postgres comes to $43.67/month.

Is Fly.io's Hobby plan still available?

Not to new customers. The $5/month Hobby plan, along with Launch and Scale, was discontinued on October 7, 2024. Organizations that bought a plan before that date can stay on it unless they convert to Pay As You Go, delete their payment method, or stop using Fly.

How much does Fly.io Managed Postgres cost?

$38/month for the Basic plan up to $1,922/month for Performance, plus $0.28/GB/month for storage. Backups, high availability, and automatic failover are included.

Is there a Fly.io pricing calculator?

Yes. Fly publishes one at fly.io/calculator for estimating a bill from your own Machine sizes, regions, and traffic. Its docs also list worked examples, summarized above.

Why is my Fly.io bill higher than expected?

Most often the extras. Machine prices vary by region, volumes are billed on provisioned capacity even when detached or attached to a stopped Machine, a dedicated IPv4 address is $2/month, and cross-region private network traffic is billed in both directions. A database is usually the largest single item.

Is Fly.io cheaper than self-hosting?

For a small, bursty app, often yes: a bot or low-traffic service on the smallest Machine costs a few dollars a month. For a steady production app with a database, a flat VPS usually comes out lower, because Managed Postgres alone starts at $38/month and every extra dimension is billed separately. The honest comparison is a usage bill someone else operates against a flat server bill you operate yourself.

Does Fly.io have built-in analytics or error tracking?

Fly provides logs, live tail, log search and export, and metrics, plus a documented Sentry integration for error tracking that Sentry prices separately. It has no built-in web analytics or session replay. Temps includes error tracking, analytics, session replay, and uptime monitoring in the same binary that handles deployment.

Is there a self-hosted version of Fly.io?

No. Fly.io runs your Machines on its own servers, and there is no downloadable or self-hostable platform. Temps is the closest self-hosted equivalent: it runs containers from a Dockerfile or autodetected source, with managed databases, preview environments, and multi-node clustering over WireGuard, as a single binary on any VPS.

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Last updated October 2026.

Related guides:

• Temps vs Fly.io — the side-by-side feature and pricing comparison
• Railway Pricing 2026: What It Actually Costs — the same breakdown for Railway's usage-credit model
• Temps vs Render 2026 — the same comparison against Render's flat workspace pricing
• 9 Best Heroku Alternatives — Fly.io is one of nine options compared, including Temps
• 8 Best Sentry Alternatives for Error Tracking — the error tracking tools Fly.io doesn't include