3,000 credits/month; extra 1,500-credit packs cost $10.
- Free option
- Free: 300 credits per month with a hard stop. Commercial use is allowed; enough for a small site with modest traffic and few production deploys.
- Why it fits
- Static sites and frontend apps that deploy from Git and want a generous, mature workflow.
- How deploys work
- Connect the Git repo; pushes build and deploy automatically with previews for every pull request.
- The tradeoff
- The credit system makes bills hard to predict — traffic, deploys, and compute all drain one pool.
- The managed database bills on top of this estimate.
Option 2 App platform
Railway
≈$20/mo Pro
$20 minimum with higher resource limits and unlimited team seats.
- Free option
- Free: $1 of monthly usage credits, capped at 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB per service, one replica, and 3-day log history.
- Why it fits
- Full-stack apps and APIs where you want the app and its database running in minutes.
- How deploys work
- Connect a repo or image; Railway detects the build, deploys it, and adds databases with one click.
- The tradeoff
- Pure usage billing means the bill moves with your traffic — predictable only while the app is small.
- The managed database bills on top of this estimate.
Horizontal scaling; database and extra transfer on top.
- Free option
- Free tier: 3 apps with static sites, 1 GiB of outbound transfer each per month. Extra static-site apps cost $3/month.
- Why it fits
- Apps that want git-push deploys inside a provider they can grow with.
- How deploys work
- Connect the Git repo or a container image; App Platform builds, deploys, and scales it.
- The tradeoff
- Weaker compute per dollar than a Droplet — the convenience premium is real.
- The managed database bills on top of this estimate.
