Guide
What hosting really costs in 2026
One small production app, priced four ways from each provider's own price list — and what you trade at each price.
Prices checked on October 22, 2026, from each provider's own pricing page.
The app
A small production app
A web process and a background worker, Postgres with about 30 GB of data, and a small Redis. The kind of app most teams are paying for today.
Monthly cost, side by side
| Where | Per month | What that buys |
|---|---|---|
| Heroku | $135 | 2 Standard-2X dynos ($50 each, 1 GB RAM), Postgres Essential-2 ($20, 32 GB), Key-Value Store Premium-0 ($15). |
| Render | about $113 | Pro workspace ($25), 2 Standard instances ($25 each, 2 GB RAM), Postgres 0.5c-1g ($19) plus 31 GB of extra storage at $0.30/GB, Key Value 256 MB ($10). Bandwidth over 25 GB is $0.15/GB. |
| Railway | about $47, usage-based | Pro plan ($20, includes $20 of usage). At $10 per GB of RAM and $20 per vCPU a month: about 3.25 GB of RAM ($32.50), half a vCPU on average ($10) and a 32 GB volume ($4.80). Busier apps pay more. |
| Your own server + Railyard | €8.99 + $0 or $19 | A Hetzner CX33 (4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB disk, 20 TB of traffic in the EU) runs all four pieces. Railyard's Free plan covers 1 server plus a database server and 3 apps; Pro is $19 a month per team. A DigitalOcean Droplet with 2 vCPU and 4 GB is $24. |
The trade
What you give up, and what you don't
Managed platforms run the machines
On Heroku, Render and Railway you never see a server. You pay for that in the price per GB of memory.
Your own server is one machine you rent
You pick Hetzner, DigitalOcean or Vultr and pay them directly. The provider looks after the hardware; your apps share the machine's memory.
Railyard does the platform part
Deploys from Git, HTTPS, zero-downtime releases, Postgres and Redis, backups, logs and alerts — on the server you own. Your servers stay at your provider's price, with no markup.
Read the small print
Costs that aren't in the headline price
- Bandwidth: Render includes 25 GB a month on Pro, then $0.15 per GB. Railway charges $0.05 per GB of egress.
- Build minutes: Render Pro includes 1,000 a month, then $5 per 1,000.
- Database storage: Render charges $0.30 per GB beyond the first.
- Workspace fees: Render Pro is $25 a month before any compute.
Sources
See it on your own server
The Free plan covers 1 server plus a database server and 3 apps. No card. Or we'll move your app with you on a free call.