Calculators and money-honest breakdowns for founders who run the numbers.
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57 posts
Tinybird's 2026 pricing bills vCPU-seconds, not queries or storage. One always-on vCPU is $518.40/month. Here is the worked 30-day bill and the only lever that cuts it.
As of July 2026, Knock's notification API charges per message, where a message is one delivery to one user on one channel. The Starter plan is $250 per month for 50,000 messages, then $0.005 each. Because Knock meters per channel, a single notification sent to email, push, and in-app counts as three messages, so a 5,000-user app fanning three channels can run about $750 per month. The same alerts cost roughly $250 on Courier's per-notification meter and about $54 on Novu's per-run Pro plan. Match the meter to your channel fan-out before you pick a vendor.
Axiom bills on two meters, data loaded and query compute, not host count. A 2026 teardown with the free tier, the $25 flat band, three worked bills and the query-compute trap that quietly doubles the invoice.
Pusher Channels pricing in 2026 runs from a free Sandbox (100 concurrent connections, 200k messages/day) to $49 Startup, $99 Pro, $299 Business, and up to $1,199, billed on two meters: peak concurrent connections and messages per day. The trap is peak connections, because your plan must cover your highest simultaneous connection count, so a single 25-minute spike can push you from $99 to $499 for the whole month. This teardown works three real monthly bills, shows why the same app costs $99 on Pusher, about $278 on Ably, and about $630 on Liveblocks purely because each bills on a different meter, and does the self-host crossover math with Soketi.
Convex pricing in 2026, broken down: the $25/developer seat cost, the database-bandwidth meter that bills every document your queries scan, three worked 30-day bills, and the single index that cut a sample bill 35%.
Langfuse pricing in 2026 starts free (Hobby: 50,000 units per month), then $29/month (Core), $199 (Pro), and $2,499 (Enterprise), with extra units at $8 per 100,000. The catch: a unit is every trace, observation, and score, so one multi-step agent request can burn 20 or more units. That is why a busy agent app pays far more than its request count suggests.
Inngest pricing meters every step, not every job. Here are the real 2026 rates, three worked 30-day bills, and the two meters (step count and concurrency) that actually spike your invoice.
WorkOS pricing in 2026 is free for authentication up to 1 million monthly active users, then $2,500 per additional 1M. The real cost is enterprise features: SSO and Directory Sync (SCIM) run $125 per connection per month each, dropping to $50 at scale. Your WorkOS bill is driven by how many enterprise customers you have, not how many users.
PlanetScale killed its free tier, so what does it really cost in 2026? A numbers-first teardown: the full price ladder, a worked monthly bill for a small production app, and the exact usage point where a cheaper database like Neon wins.
As of July 2026, PostHog has no fixed subscription. It is free to start with no credit card, and each of its products bills separately once you pass a generous monthly free tier: 1M product-analytics events, 5K session replays, 1M feature-flag requests, 100K error-tracking exceptions, and more. Product analytics starts at $0.00005 per anonymous event and gets cheaper per event as volume rises. The catch nobody flags: identified events can cost up to 4x more. Most side projects pay $0; a growing SaaS usually lands between roughly $50 and a few hundred dollars a month; the five-figure horror stories come from high-volume, autocapture-heavy, all-identified setups with no billing limit set.
As of July 2026, Upstash Redis is free up to 256 MB and 500K commands per month; pay-as-you-go bills $0.20 per 100K commands plus $0.25/GB stored, and fixed plans run $10 to $1,500/month. Because Upstash charges per command, not per server, request volume sets your bill, not data size. Above ~5M commands/month a flat $10 fixed plan usually beats pay-as-you-go.
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%.
