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Author

Diego Aguirre

Infrastructure economics

Fly.io Pricing in 2026: The Real 30-Day Bill

Fly.io pricing in 2026 is pure pay-as-you-go: you pay per second for the Machines (micro-VMs) you actually run, not a fixed plan. A small always-on app on a shared-cpu-1x 256MB Machine costs about $2.02 a month; a two-Machine production SaaS with Postgres and Redis lands near $29 a month; a three-region app on performance Machines runs about $226 a month. The old Hobby, Launch, and Scale plan names were retired in the October 2024 pay-as-you-go switch, and the biggest lever left is a machine reservation, which cuts committed compute by 40%.

8 min read260

Mux Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay to Stream Video

Mux bills video in three meters, not one plan price. Here is the real 2026 arithmetic: worked 30-day bills for three app sizes, the resolution multiplier that quietly quadruples costs, and four levers that lower the bill.

6 min read143

Algolia Pricing in 2026: What Search Really Costs

As of July 2026, Algolia uses usage-based pricing with no flat subscription on its self-serve plans: a free Build tier (10K searches and 1M records a month), then Grow at $0.50 per 1,000 search requests and $0.40 per 1,000 records past the free allowance. Because search requests dominate at scale, the same store can cost $0 on the free tier, about $226 a month while growing, or roughly $1,655 a month at high traffic. Your bill is driven by search volume and replica count, not by raw data size.

6 min read115
Pricing Teardowns

SendGrid Pricing in 2026: The Real Monthly Bill (and Why the Free Plan Is Gone)

As of July 2026, SendGrid no longer has a permanent free plan: the floor is a 60-day trial then Essentials at $19.95/mo (50,000 emails). Pro starts at $89.95/mo (100,000 emails plus one dedicated IP). Your real bill is the base price plus per-email overage ($0.0013 on the 50K plan, $0.0009 on 100K, $0.0011 on entry Pro). A 10K/mo sender pays a flat $19.95; 200K/mo on Pro runs about $199.95 if you eat overage.

6 min read195
Infrastructure economics

Cloudinary Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay

Cloudinary pricing in 2026 runs on credits: 1 credit equals 1,000 transformations, 1 GB of managed storage, or 1 GB of net delivery bandwidth. Free gives 25 credits, Plus is $99/mo ($89 annual) for 225 credits, and Advanced is $249/mo ($224 annual) for 600 credits. Because credits are one shared pool, delivery bandwidth is usually the line that runs out first, and it works out to roughly $0.40 per GB, far above a raw CDN.

8 min read206
tools

Lovable Pricing in 2026: What 100 Credits Really Cost You

As of July 2026, Lovable costs $0 (Free, 5 build credits/day up to 30 a month), $25/month (Pro, 100 credits), or $50/month (Business, the same 100 credits plus SSO and governance); Enterprise is volume-based. A credit buys a variable amount of work: 0.50 to 1.70 credits per action in Default Mode, or 1 credit per message in Plan Mode. That puts the effective rate around $0.25 per credit on Pro and $0.50 on Business. Budget by credits-per-feature, not the sticker.

8 min read326
Infrastructure economics

Resend Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay

Resend pricing in 2026 runs from a permanent Free tier (3,000 emails per month, capped at 100 per day) to Pro at $20 per month for 50,000 emails or $35 for 100,000, then Scale from $90 up to $1,150 per month for 2.5 million emails, with $0.90 per 1,000 overage. The catch the pricing page hides: your real cost is the effective price per 1,000 emails, which swings from $0.40 to $3.33 on the same $20 plan depending on how full your tier is. Budget by the tier you actually fill, and watch the separate marketing-contacts meter.

8 min read392
Infrastructure economics

Clerk Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay Per User

Clerk's Free plan covers 50,000 monthly retained users (MRU) in 2026, so most side projects and early-stage SaaS pay $0. Pro is $25/month with 50,000 MRU included, then $0.02 per user in the 50,001 to 100,000 band. The bill that surprises teams is not per-user overage; it is the feature add-ons, B2B Auth at $100/month, Administration at $100/month, and extra Enterprise SSO connections at $75/month each. Clerk also bills retained users, not signups, so anyone who does not return 24 hours after signing up costs nothing.

7 min read202