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

Quick answer (2026): Fly.io is pure pay-as-you-go. You pay per running second of each Machine, plus storage, bandwidth and an optional support plan. A shared-cpu-1x 256MB Machine running 24/7 costs $2.19 a month; a performance-1x 2GB Machine costs $33.00 a month, both in Ashburn (iad) and Secaucus (ewr), Fly's lowest-priced regions, with a per-region multiplier of up to 1.615 on top. Extra RAM adds $6.00 per GB per month. Volumes are $0.15/GB per month of provisioned capacity, while snapshots are $0.08/GB per month of data actually stored (incremental, first 10GB free), and a stopped or suspended Machine still bills $0.15 per GB of rootfs over 30 days. Egress is $0.02/GB in North America and Europe, $0.04/GB in Asia Pacific, Oceania and South America, and $0.12/GB in Africa and India, and cross-region private network traffic is a second, separate meter at $0.006, $0.015 and $0.050/GB, billed in both directions. A dedicated IPv4 is $2/month. Managed Postgres is a cluster plan from $38/month plus $0.28/GB of storage, not a Machine. There is no permanent free tier for new accounts and no monthly platform fee, and the $29/month figure everyone quotes is the Standard support plan, not a hosting tier (Premium is $199/month, Enterprise starts at $2,500/month). Reserve a block of compute time and you get 40% off CPU and additional RAM, which drops a performance-1x Machine from $33.00 to $19.80 a month.

_Updated October 10, 2026. Every rate above was re-verified on this date against Fly.io's own resource pricing docs and its pricing page{target=blank}, which agree to the cent.

Correction, October 10, 2026: this page previously published the compute ladder at a superseded rate card, quoting $2.02 a month for a shared-cpu-1x 256MB Machine and $32.19 for a performance-1x 2GB Machine, and describing both as the Amsterdam baseline. Fly.io's current published rates are $2.19 and $33.00 in its lowest-priced regions, Ashburn and Secaucus, and Amsterdam carries a 1.038 multiplier on top of those. Additional RAM was given as $5 per GB per 30 days and is $6.00. The page also said six things end up on the invoice; Fly.io's own list is about fifteen rows and includes cross-region private network transfer, Managed Postgres cluster plans, Sprites, Fly Kubernetes, static egress IPs and single-hostname certificates, so all three worked bills below have been re-based. Snapshots were billed here on provisioned volume size, where Fly.io bills them on the data actually stored. And this page told readers to budget a monthly minimum of about $5; Fly.io states there is no monthly platform fee, so that floor has been removed.

The 2024 numbers the internet still quotes, against the 2026 meter

Search this topic and you get a museum of dead numbers. Here is the gap between what most results still say and what Fly.io actually charges in 2026.

That last row is the one that matters. On a small Fly.io bill the largest single line is often the support plan rather than the compute: $29 a month of Standard support is more than thirteen shared-cpu-1x Machines running around the clock. Pricing support as if it were the server is how people conclude Fly.io is expensive when the compute underneath costs a couple of dollars.

Fly.io pricing in 2026 has one governing rule: you pay by the second for the Machines you run, and that single fact is why every summary you find seems to contradict the last one.

Fly.io runs your app as one or more Machines, which are fast-booting micro-VMs, and it bills you for exactly the seconds each Machine is awake, plus the storage and bandwidth it touches. There is no monthly seat, no per-app plan, and since the October 2024 switch to pay-as-you-go, no mandatory Hobby or Launch tier either. That is a bargain for a scale-to-zero side project and a trap for an always-on fleet you forgot to reserve.

Here is what a real 30-day bill looks like, on three cohorts, with the arithmetic shown.

What Fly.io pricing actually covers in 2026

Fly.io's own "Everything we bill for" table runs to about fifteen rows, so do not read the compute ladder as the bill. Running Machines, extra RAM, persistent volumes, snapshots and public egress are the five lines most small apps actually touch, but cross-region private network transfer, Managed Postgres, Sprites, Fly Kubernetes, static egress IPs and third-party extensions each bill separately the moment you use them. Every number below is taken from Fly's own resource pricing docs (2026).

The running-Machine ladder, billed per second, shown here as a 30-day month in Ashburn (iad) and Secaucus (ewr), Fly's lowest-priced regions:

Need more memory on a given size? Extra RAM runs $6.00 per GB per month, up to 128GB.

The line items that are easy to forget:

Shared IPv4 and the global Anycast network are included, so most apps never pay for an address.

The plans everyone still quotes are gone

Half the results for "fly.io pricing" still list Hobby at $5, Launch at $29, and Scale at $199. Those were the legacy plan tiers, and Fly retired the tiered model in the October 2024 pay-as-you-go switch. In 2026, that "$29" is the entry Support plan, not a compute plan, and Fly layers higher support tiers and a $99 per month HIPAA-compliant option on top. Compute itself is pure usage. If you want a real-world gut check, the r/elixir "is fly.io ridiculously expensive" thread walks through an all-in bill of roughly $50 a month for app, Postgres, Redis, storage, and bandwidth.

The free story changed too. The old free allowance (three shared-cpu-1x 256MB VMs plus 3GB of volume) still applies to organizations on plans discontinued in October 2024, but new accounts get a free trial instead: 2 hours of Machine runtime or 7 days, whichever comes first, with no card needed to start. After that you are on pay-as-you-go, and Fly.io is explicit that there is no monthly platform fee: its own worked example of a 24/7 Discord bot on the smallest Machine totals $2.21 a month. Some allowances stay free after the trial, including the first 10GB of snapshot storage each month, the first 10 single-hostname certificates, all inbound data, shared IPv4 and IPv6.

Bill 1: the weekend project (scale-to-zero)

One small app, a SQLite file on a volume, and Fly's auto-stop / auto-start so the Machine sleeps when nobody is hitting it. Say real traffic keeps it awake 6 hours a day, about 180 hours across the month.

• App Machine, shared-cpu-1x 256MB, 180 hrs x $0.0030 = $0.55
• Rootfs while stopped (1GB, the other ~540 hrs) = $0.11
• 1GB volume for SQLite, 1 x $0.15 = $0.15
• 3GB egress, North America, 3 x $0.02 = $0.06
• Shared IPv4 and Anycast = $0.00

Metered total: $0.87 for the month, and that is the whole bill: there is no platform fee and no minimum to round it up. The lesson: on Fly, an idle app is a cheap app, because you are not paying for the 20 hours a day it sleeps.

Bill 2: the production small SaaS

Now it has to stay up. Two app Machines for high availability, a Postgres Machine, a small Redis, and a dedicated address so you can pin a wildcard cert.

• 2 app Machines, shared-cpu-2x 1GB, 24/7, 2 x $7.39 = $14.78
• 1 Postgres Machine, shared-cpu-2x 1GB, 24/7 = $7.39
• 10GB Postgres volume, 10 x $0.15 = $1.50
• 1 Redis Machine, shared-cpu-1x 256MB, 24/7 = $2.19
• 1GB Redis volume = $0.15
• Dedicated IPv4 = $2.00
• Wildcard TLS = $1.00
• 100GB egress, North America / Europe, 100 x $0.02 = $2.00

Total: $31.01 for the month. That is a genuinely production-shaped stack, HA app plus a database plus a cache plus TLS, for about thirty dollars, because shared-cpu Machines are cheap and you only run five of them.

One caveat changes that number more than any rate does. The Postgres line above is unmanaged Fly Postgres, which you run and back up yourself, and Fly.io now files it under Unsupported Products. The managed product is not a Machine at all, it is a cluster plan: $38 a month for Basic (shared-2x, 1GB) rising to $1,922 for Performance, plus $0.28/GB of database storage. Swap the self-run Postgres Machine and its 10GB volume ($8.89) for Managed Postgres Basic holding 10GB ($40.80) and the identical stack is $62.92 a month, roughly double. On a bill this size, which Postgres you pick matters more than every compute rate on this page.

Bill 3: the three-region scaling app

Traffic is global now, so you run the app in three regions, give Postgres a read replica, and turn on snapshots and support.

• 3 app Machines, performance-1x 2GB, one per region, 24/7, 3 x $33.00 = $99.00
• Postgres primary + 1 replica, performance-1x 2GB each, 2 x $33.00 = $66.00
• 100GB of Postgres volumes (2 x 50GB), 100 x $0.15 = $15.00
• Snapshots on 40GB of stored data (assumed), first 10GB free, 30 x $0.08 = $2.40
• Dedicated IPv4 = $2.00
• 500GB egress: 400GB North America / Europe ($8.00) + 100GB Asia Pacific ($4.00) = $12.00
• Cross-region private network, 20GB from North America / Europe ($0.12) + 10GB from Asia Pacific ($0.15), billed both directions (assumed) = $0.27
• Standard support = $29.00

Total: $225.67 for the month. Five performance Machines running around the clock are the whole story: they are $165.00 of that bill on their own. Which is exactly where the one real lever lives.

Two things about the regional figures. Those Machines are priced at the Ashburn and Secaucus rate, and a genuinely global deployment pays the per-region multiplier, so the same performance-1x Machine is $38.08 in Frankfurt and $41.89 in Singapore. And it is the Postgres replica that makes the private network line appear at all, because Fly.io bills cross-region traffic in both directions, the request at the rate of the region it leaves and the response at the rate of the region it leaves.

The 40% lever nobody quantifies: machine reservations

Fly sells reserved compute blocks at a 40% discount versus on-demand. The published rate is $144 per year for $20 per month of usage, which works out to $12 of billed cost for every $20 of compute you actually run.

Bill 3 runs $165.00 a month of always-on performance compute. Reserve it and that becomes:

$165.00 x 0.60 = $99.00 a month, a saving of $66.00 a month, or $792.00 a year.

Put another way, reservations drop your effective rate on a performance-1x Machine from $33.00 to $19.80 a month. Bill 3 as a whole falls from $225.67 to about $159.67 a month with no change to the app. If a Machine is going to run 24/7 for a year anyway, not reserving it is leaving 40% on the table. The catch is commitment: reserve compute you will not use and you have prepaid for idle capacity, so only reserve the Machines you are sure stay on.

Two constraints the headline discount hides. A block is bought per CPU class and per region, so the three-region fleet in Bill 3 needs blocks in each region rather than one blanket reservation, and the monthly credit applies only to CPU and additional RAM charges, never to volumes, snapshots, egress or support. Blocks come in fixed sizes, $36/year for $5/month of shared usage and $144/year for $20/month of performance usage, with $360 and $1,440 steps above, and the credit does not roll over from month to month.

The line items that bill while you sleep

Two Fly costs surprise people because they keep charging when nothing is happening.

1. Stopped Machines are not free. A stopped Machine still stores its root filesystem, billed at $0.15 per GB per month. A handful of stopped 2GB Machines is a few dollars a month for containers doing nothing. Destroy the ones you are finished with; do not just stop them.
2. Volumes bill on provisioned size, not used size. A 50GB volume holding 8GB of data still costs 50 x $0.15 = $7.50 a month. Over-provisioning "to be safe" is a standing charge. Size volumes to near-term need and grow them later.

Route-aware egress matters at scale too: the same gigabyte costs $0.02 served to North America and $0.12 served to India, a 6x spread. If a real share of your traffic sits in the high-cost regions, a cache or CDN in front pays for itself quickly.

How it stacks up against Render and Railway

Render and Railway are the two platforms Fly gets compared to most, and the honest answer is that it depends on your duty cycle. Fly's per-second billing and auto-stop make it the cheapest of the three for spiky or scale-to-zero workloads, and its multi-region story is the strongest. For a simple always-on web service with a managed database and no interest in tuning Machines, Render's flat instance pricing is easier to predict, and Railway's usage model sits in between. If you want the full 30-day math on those two, see the Render pricing teardown and the Railway pricing teardown. The old Heroku muscle memory of "one dyno, one price" is the mental model Fly breaks: on Fly you are buying seconds, not dynos.

Math check: a performance-1x Machine is $33.00 a month on demand and $19.80 reserved, so the only number that really sets your Fly bill is how many Machines truly run 24/7, and how many of those you remembered to reserve.