Render pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives
Render (render.com) is a hosting platform. Flat workspace fee plus per-instance compute and bandwidth. Free plan: Hobby workspace, 5 GB bandwidth.
What Render costs
- Entry plan: $25/mo
- Small app: $21.25/mo
Plan compared: Pro workspace, $25 flat. Cheapest paid plan per month (per seat where plans are seat-based).
Render price hikes
- Render cut included bandwidth 20× · Apr 23, 2026
Render replaced per-member plans with flat workspace plans and cut included bandwidth twenty-fold, billing overage at $0.15 per GB. Every workspace moved over on August 1, 2026, with no way back. - Render cut its free tier · May 20, 2024
New free Postgres databases expire after 30 days instead of 90.
Cheaper alternatives to Render
At the entry plan, Render costs $25/mo. 8 hosting platforms cost less:
- Fly.io: $2.19/mo (Smallest Machine, 256 MB)
- Railway: $5/mo (Hobby: $5 incl. $5 usage)
- Heroku: $5/mo (Eco: $5 for 1,000 dyno hours)
- Cloudflare Workers: $5/mo (Workers Paid, $5 minimum)
- DigitalOcean Apps: $5/mo (512 MiB shared container)
- Hetzner Cloud: $7.49/mo (CPX02: 1 vCPU, 1 GB (EU))
- Netlify: $9/mo (Personal: $9, 1,000 credits)
- Vercel: $20/mo (Pro: $20 incl. 1 seat and $20 credit)
Render alternatives: 8 cheaper hosting platforms compared, at every size.
Every change we logged
- Apr 23, 2026 · Limits cut: Included bandwidth cut 20× with per-GB overage, and per-member plans replaced by flat workspace plans.
- May 20, 2024 · Free tier cut: New free Postgres databases expire after 30 days instead of 90.
- Sep 2023 · Repriced: Bandwidth moved from a per-service allowance to per-workspace pools with per-user team plans.
Sources
Pricing page: render.com/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Small app = Hobby $0 + Starter $7 + 95 GB × $0.15 = $21.25 (on Pro it's $43.25). The $7 Starter instance and the $0.15/GB bandwidth are on Render's pricing page.