Fly.io price increase: the October 2026 maths

On 1 October 2026 Fly.io changed one number: Machine memory now costs $6.00 per GB per month in its cheapest regions, up from $5.00. CPU prices did not move, and neither did volumes, egress or IPv4. Because every Machine preset bundles RAM, every preset got more expensive — but by very different amounts. Below: old vs new for twelve presets, what that does to four typical apps, the regional multipliers on top, and whether Fly is still the cheap option.

What exactly changed

• Memory: $0.00000193 → $0.000002316 per GB-second, i.e. $5.00 → $6.00 per GB-month, a 20% rise. Source: Fly’s “2026 Pricing Update” page and the per-second rates in Fly’s own docs change for 1 October.
• CPU: unchanged. A shared vCPU still costs about $0.69 a month before RAM; a performance vCPU about $21. The headline preset prices moved only because each preset includes memory (256MB per shared vCPU, 2GB per performance vCPU).
• Unchanged lines: volumes $0.15/GB-month (provisioned), snapshots $0.08/GB-month after 10GB free, egress $0.02/GB in North America and Europe ($0.04 in Asia-Pacific and South America, $0.12 in Africa and India), dedicated IPv4 $2/month.
• Who it applies to: the update page does not mention grandfathering or a notice period, so assume it hits every organization from the October invoice period. Check your next invoice rather than taking our word for it.

Old vs new: twelve presets

Always-on monthly price in Ashburn / Secaucus (multiplier 1.0), computed from Fly’s per-second rates before and after 1 October. Fly’s own calculator can differ by a few cents from rounding.

The pattern is simple: the more RAM per CPU, the closer the rise gets to the full 20%. A shared-cpu-1x with 2GB is almost all memory, so it rises +18.7%; a performance-1x with its default 2GB is mostly CPU and rises +6.5%. If you run small shared machines with extra RAM — the usual shape for Rails, Django, Node and JVM apps — you are on the steep end.

What it does to four typical apps

Machines only, always-on, Ashburn / Secaucus prices:

For hobby projects the change is pocket money. For a fleet of memory-heavy machines it is a real line item — the performance example above pays $288.15 more a year for the same hardware. Your full bill rises by a smaller percentage than the machines alone, because databases, volumes and egress did not change: the small production app with Fly Managed Postgres Basic ($38 + 10GB × $0.28) and the 74GB of monthly egress from our 50,000-visit scenario comes to about $59.37 a month today. For the database side across eight providers, see managed Postgres pricing 2026.

Regions multiply the increase

Fly’s regional multipliers apply to CPU and RAM, so the new memory price is $6.00 only in Ashburn and Secaucus. The small production app from above, by region:

If your users are in Europe and you deploy to Frankfurt by habit, moving to Amsterdam or Stockholm (both ×1.038) claws back most of what the October increase added there. Latency within western Europe rarely justifies the Frankfurt premium for a typical web app — measure before you assume.

Four ways to soften it

• Right-size memory first. RAM is now the expensive half of most Fly bills. Look at actual memory use in Fly’s metrics; a Node or Python service that peaks at 600MB on a 2GB machine is paying $6.00 a month for each idle GB. Fly also supports a swap file (swap_size_mb in fly.toml) as a cushion for rare spikes — slower than RAM, but it can let you step down a size.
• Reserve compute. Fly sells one-year blocks at a 40% discount: $36/year buys $5/month of shared-CPU credit, applied to CPU and RAM in one region (credits do not roll over). For the small production app ($17.09/month), 3 blocks bring the effective cost to about $11.09/month — below the old price. Only buy blocks for the baseline you are sure to run all year.
• Let idle machines stop. Machines are billed per second while started; a stopped machine pays only $0.15/GB-month for its root filesystem. With auto_stop_machines and min_machines_running = 0, staging apps, internal tools and low-traffic APIs cost a fraction of the always-on figures above.
• Pick a cheaper region. See the table above: Ashburn, Secaucus, Amsterdam and Stockholm are the cheapest; Chicago and Dallas are ×1.25; São Paulo ×1.615.

Is Fly still the cheap PaaS?

Mostly, yes. Even at $6.00 per GB, Fly’s memory is cheaper than Railway’s (about $10.01 per GB-month, $0.00000386 per GB-second) and far cheaper than Render’s fixed sizes. The catch is that Railway bills memory you actually use, while Fly bills what the machine has, so a mostly idle service can still come out cheaper on Railway. Cheapest plan that fits each stack’s RAM baseline for a small production app (50,000 visits/mo, ~74GB egress), metered egress included, from our live data set as of 2026-10-05:

Read the Railway row as its plan minimum: compute is metered per second, so a busy service costs more. Heroku’s cheapest fit for light stacks can be an Eco dyno that sleeps when idle, and orkestr.eu’s $0 tier is a small EU-only starter. Fly stays at or near the top for small and mid-sized stacks; the October rise narrowed its lead rather than erasing it.

The do-it-yourself floor

If you mainly pay Fly for RAM, a plain VPS gives you far more memory per dollar — cheapest plans with at least 2GB in our data set as of 2026-10-05:

Against Fly’s $6.00 per GB that is a big gap, but you give up what Fly is good at: multi-region deploys, Anycast, per-second billing and machines that stop when idle. You also take on patching, backups and failover. VPS prices moved this year as well — see netcup G12.5 vs Hetzner and the Hetzner price increase.

Stay, or move?

• Hobby and small apps: stay. The rise is $0.50–$2.50 a month and Fly is still among the cheapest managed homes for an always-on container — compare Railway vs Fly.io and Render vs Fly.io.
• Memory-heavy fleets: do the reservation maths and the region check first; both can recover more than the increase. If RAM is most of your bill and you do not need multi-region, a VPS is the bigger lever — see Hetzner vs Fly.io.
• Coming from Heroku or Koyeb: Fly is still cheaper than Heroku for the same RAM by a wide margin, and cheaper than Koyeb below roughly $20 of compute — see leaving Heroku in 2026 and Koyeb pricing after Mistral.
• Shopping around anyway: all Fly.io alternatives ranked by cost.

Fly.io prices verified 2026-10-08 on fly.io/pricing-update, fly.io/pricing and docs.fly.io/about/pricing; pre-October per-second rates from Fly’s public docs repository. Railway rates from railway.com/pricing the same day. Comparison tables use our live data set (2026-10-05). We have no affiliate relationship with Fly.io, Railway, Render, Koyeb or Heroku; links on some VPS names are affiliate links.