Best Fly.io Alternatives for Indie Hackers in 2026

Fly.io raised Machine memory from $5.00 to $6.00 per GB a month on October 1. That's a 20% jump, announced on its 2026 pricing update page and already live in the pricing docs.

Before you migrate anything, look at what it actually costs you. A 1GB shared machine went from about $5.69 to $6.70 a month. That's one dollar.

So who should move? People running several apps, people paying $38 a month for Fly's Managed Postgres, and people with memory-hungry workers. Everyone else can stay. Here's where the movers should go.

Quick Verdict

How Much Did Fly.io Actually Go Up?

The old rates come from Fly's own docs change. Volumes stay at $0.15 per GB and egress is unchanged.

Fly is still cheap per gigabyte. Railway charges about $10 per GB of memory. Hetzner's CPX22 jumped from €7.99 to €19.49 excl. VAT on June 15, according to its price adjustment notice.

One thing to try first. Fly bills a stopped Machine only for its root filesystem, at $0.15 per GB. If your app is idle at night, turning on auto-stop may save more than any migration.

We compared the three big platforms head to head in Railway vs Render vs Fly.io. This post is for people who've already decided to leave.

Coolify on a VPS

Coolify is a self-hosted dashboard that deploys apps, databases and cron jobs to your own server. Self-hosting it is free with no feature limits. Coolify Cloud manages the dashboard for you at $5 a month for two servers, plus $3 for each extra server.

Pair it with a DigitalOcean droplet. Coolify's docs ask for at least 2 CPU cores and 2GB of RAM, so the floor is the $18 droplet with 2 vCPUs and 2GB. Hetzner used to be the default here, but its cheapest CX line shows as not available on hetzner.com right now.

The win is consolidation. Four small apps at 512MB each cost $14.76 a month on Fly, plus $38 for Managed Postgres. A $24 droplet with 2 vCPUs and 4GB runs all four and the database.

Who should NOT use this? Anyone who doesn't want to own backups, OS updates and the 3am disk-full alert. You're the ops team now.

Pick this if you run more than one project and want one predictable bill. Our Forge vs Ploi vs Coolify post covers the dashboard choice in depth.

Render

Render is the closest thing to "Fly, but with fixed prices." The Hobby workspace is $0 a month plus compute. A Starter web service with 512MB is $7, and Standard with 2GB is $25.

Postgres starts at $6 a month for 256MB, far below Fly's $38. There's a free web service too, but it spins down after 15 minutes without traffic, and free Postgres databases expire after 30 days.

Who should NOT use this? Apps that need 1GB. There's no tier between 512MB at $7 and 2GB at $25, so you'll often pay for memory you don't use.

Pick this if you want a managed platform and a bill that's the same every month.

DigitalOcean App Platform

App Platform has the cheapest flat 1GB container on this list. A shared container with 1 vCPU and 512MiB is $5 a month, and 1GiB is $10 with 100GiB of transfer included. Dev databases are $7.

It deploys from a Git repo or a Dockerfile, so moving a Fly app across is mostly a config change.

Who should NOT use this? Anyone who chose Fly for multi-region deploys close to users. App Platform runs each app in one region.

Pick this if you want Render's simplicity at a lower 1GB price.

Railway

Railway bills by the second for what your service actually uses. Hobby is $5 a month and includes $5 of usage. Memory works out to about $10 per GB a month and CPU to about $20 per vCPU.

That makes Railway great for small services that sit mostly idle, and worse than Fly for anything memory-hungry. There's also a free plan with $1 of monthly usage, enough to test a deploy.

Who should NOT use this? Always-on apps above 1GB. At $10 per GB, you'd pay more than you do on Fly even after the increase.

Pick this if you like Fly's usage billing but want a nicer dashboard.

Google Cloud Run

Cloud Run runs any container and scales to zero when nobody's calling it. The monthly free tier covers 180,000 vCPU-seconds, 360,000 GiB-seconds and 2 million requests.

For a side project or an internal API, that can mean a $0 bill.

Who should NOT use this? Anyone who hates cold starts or the Google Cloud console. The first request after an idle spell waits for a container to boot.

Pick this if your app is quiet most of the day.

How Do You Choose?

Start with your Fly invoice, not the price list.

If you need multi-region, stay on Fly and switch on auto-stop. If Postgres is a big line, or you run several small apps, the savings are real. Consolidate on one VPS with Coolify. If the app idles most of the day, try Cloud Run. For a single always-on app, DigitalOcean wins at 1GB and Render wins at 512MB.

Which One Wins?

Coolify on a VPS. It turns several Fly machines and a $38 managed database into one flat server bill, and the dashboard is free.

Render is the pick if you'd rather pay someone else to handle the ops. And if you run a single small app on Fly? Honestly, stay. A dollar a month isn't worth a migration weekend. The Heroku alternatives and Vercel alternatives posts cover the rest of the hosting map.

Found a better option? Let me know on Twitter @devtoolpicks.