Cheaper Render alternatives
Pricing data as of 2026-08-28 · refreshed weekly
Baseline: a Next.js app with startup-level traffic (~50,000 visits/month) costs $17.35/month on Render (512 MB / 0.5 CPU). Every provider below can run the same workload — ranked by real list price. Cheaper is not always better: a paas platform and a raw VPS differ in how much ops work lands on you.
| Provider | Type | Plan | $/month | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel | serverless | Hobby | $0 | Render vs Vercel → |
| Orkestr | paas | Starter | $0 | Render vs Orkestr → |
| Koyeb | paas | eco-micro | $2.68 | Render vs Koyeb → |
| DigitalOcean Droplets | vps | Basic 512MB | $4 | Render vs DigitalOcean Droplets → |
| OVHcloud VPS | vps | VPS-1 | $4.54 | Render vs OVHcloud VPS → |
| Fly.io | paas | shared-cpu-1x 512MB | $4.8 | Render vs Fly.io → |
| Vultr | vps | Cloud Compute 1GB | $5 | Render vs Vultr → |
| Railway | paas | Hobby | $5 | Render vs Railway → |
| Linode (Akamai) | vps | Nanode 1GB | $5 | Render vs Linode (Akamai) → |
| AWS Lightsail | vps | $5 bundle | $5 | Render vs AWS Lightsail → |
| Heroku | paas | Eco | $5 | Render vs Heroku → |
| Netcup | vps | VPS 500 G12 | $6.4 | Render vs Netcup → |
| Hostinger VPS | vps | KVM 1 | $6.49 | Render vs Hostinger VPS → |
| Hetzner Cloud | vps | CX23 | $7.09 | Render vs Hetzner Cloud → |
| Scaleway | vps | DEV1-S | $7.1 | Render vs Scaleway → |
| Netlify | serverless | Pro | $20 | Render vs Netlify → |