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

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

Six things end up on the invoice: running Machines, extra RAM, persistent volumes, snapshots, bandwidth, and a short list of add-ons. 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:

Need more memory on a given size? Extra RAM runs about $5 per GB per 30 days.

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 that already had it, but new accounts get a free trial instead: 2 hours of Machine runtime or 7 days, whichever comes first. After that you are on pay-as-you-go, which carries a small monthly minimum (community-reported around $5 on the Hobby plan). Budget as if that floor is real.

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 $0.0028 = $0.50
• 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: $0.82 for the month. In practice the Hobby minimum rounds you up toward $5, so call it five dollars. 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 $6.64 = $13.28
• 1 Postgres Machine, shared-cpu-2x 1GB, 24/7 = $6.64
• 10GB Postgres volume, 10 x $0.15 = $1.50
• 1 Redis Machine, shared-cpu-1x 256MB, 24/7 = $2.02
• 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: $28.59 for the month. That is a genuinely production-shaped stack, HA app plus a real database plus a cache plus TLS, for under thirty dollars, because shared-cpu Machines are cheap and you only run five of them.

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 $32.19 = $96.57
• Postgres primary + 1 replica, performance-1x 2GB each, 2 x $32.19 = $64.38
• 100GB of Postgres volumes (2 x 50GB), 100 x $0.15 = $15.00
• Snapshots on 100GB provisioned, first 10GB free, 90 x $0.08 = $7.20
• Dedicated IPv4 = $2.00
• 500GB egress: 400GB North America / Europe ($8.00) + 100GB Asia Pacific ($4.00) = $12.00
• Standard support = $29.00

Total: $226.15 for the month. Five performance Machines running around the clock are the whole story: they are $160.95 of that bill on their own. Which is exactly where the one real lever lives.

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 $160.95 a month of always-on performance compute. Reserve it and that becomes:

$160.95 x 0.60 = $96.57 a month, a saving of $64.38 a month, or $772.56 a year.

Put another way, reservations drop your effective rate on a performance-1x Machine from $32.19 to $19.31 a month. Bill 3 as a whole falls from $226.15 to about $161.77 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.

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 $32.19 a month on demand and $19.31 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.