Koyeb pricing after Mistral: what $29 buys

On 17 February 2026 Koyeb announced it was joining Mistral AI and, in the same post, discontinued its free Starter plan: new users now have to subscribe to Pro, Scale or Enterprise. Existing organizations on an existing plan were told nothing changes for them. For anyone starting today the entry ticket is $29/month, of which $10 is compute credit. Whether that is expensive depends almost entirely on how much compute you run — below we work through the maths, then price the same app on five platforms.

How Koyeb bills in 2026

• Pro: $29/month including $10 of compute, 10 users and 100 services. Scale: $299/month including $100 of compute. Enterprise starts at $1,000/month.
• Instances are billed per second at list price once usage passes the included credit: nano $2.68, micro $5.36, small $10.71, medium $21.43, large $42.85 per month always-on. “Eco” instances give twice the RAM for the same price (eco-small: 0.5 vCPU / 1GB for $5.36) but exist only in Washington D.C., Frankfurt and Singapore.
• Serverless Postgres: Small (0.25 vCPU / 1GB) $29.76, Medium $59.52, Large $119.04 per month if always active, plus $0.5/GB storage. It scales to zero when idle.
• Egress: the pricing page lists 1TB included on Pro and Scale, then $0.02/GB in the EU/US ($0.04 in Asia). The pricing FAQ still carries an older line (100GB free, $0.04/GB, “not charged yet”) — we use the pricing page.

What the $29 actually covers

Read it as a fixed $19 platform fee plus compute at list price, with a $10 minimum spend. For a single small API that fee is the whole story: a 512MB service that costs $3.69 on Fly.io costs $29here. For two 4GB services it is a rounding error, and Koyeb’s unit prices start to look good.

Compute only: Koyeb vs other PaaS, by stack

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:

Two things to keep in mind. Heroku’s cheapest pick for light stacks can be an Eco dyno, which sleeps after 30 minutes idle; orkestr.eu’s $0 tier is a 0.25 vCPU EU-only starter. Railway’s figure is its plan minimum, because compute is metered per second. Koyeb’s row barely moves between stacks — the $29 floor hides the difference between a 512MB and a 1GB service.

The full bill: web + worker + Postgres

A typical small production app — a 1GB web service, a 512MB background worker and Postgres with ~1GB of RAM and 10GB of data — priced line by line (list prices verified 2026-10-03):

Koyeb comes #4 of 5 here, and the reason is mostly the database, not the fee: an always-on Postgres Small at $29.76 for 0.25 vCPU / 1GB, against $19for Render’s 1GB Postgres. Railway is cheapest at $39.27 — at the utilisation we assumed; a busier worker or database moves it up quickly. If your Koyeb database really does sit idle most of the day, scale-to-zero narrows the gap; if it serves traffic around the clock, it will not. For a database-only comparison across eight providers, see managed Postgres pricing 2026.

Where Koyeb wins: bigger instances

Two always-on services with 4GB of RAM each, no database:

At this size the $29 fee is noise and Koyeb’s large instance — 4 vCPU and 4GB for $42.85 — undercuts Render’s 2 CPU / 4GB at $85 by half. Railway can come close if your services idle below one vCPU on average. We left Fly.io out of this table because its 4GB options mean choosing between shared and performance CPUs, which is not a like-for-like row. (For what Fly’s 1 October memory price rise did to each preset, see Fly.io price increase: the October 2026 maths.)

The do-it-yourself floor

One VPS with an open-source PaaS layer (Coolify, Dokku, Kamal) runs web, worker and Postgres together. Cheapest plans with at least 4GB RAM in our data set as of 2026-10-05:

Cheaper than every managed bill above, but backups, patching, Postgres upgrades and on-call are now yours. Price that time honestly before moving. (European VPS prices moved twice this year — see netcup G12.5 vs Hetzner.)

Stay, or move?

• You have an old Starter organization: keep it. Koyeb’s wording protects existing organizations on existing plans; a new organization would start on Pro. Do not delete the old one to “start clean”.
• Hobby project or a single small API: the $29 floor is hard to justify. Fly.io, Railway Hobby ($5 minimum) or Render’s free instance cover it — see all Koyeb alternatives ranked by cost.
• Several services, a few GB of RAM, little database: Koyeb is competitive and sometimes the cheapest managed option, with global regions and scale-to-zero. Compare directly: Render vs Koyeb, Railway vs Koyeb, Fly.io vs Koyeb.
• GPU inference: this is where Koyeb is heading as part of Mistral Compute (L4 $0.70/h, A100 $1.60/h, H100 $2.50/h on the pricing page). Our tables only cover CPU web workloads.
• EU-only requirement: Koyeb has a Frankfurt region (eco instances included), and orkestr.eu is EU-only by design — see Koyeb vs orkestr.eu.

Methodology: Koyeb, Render, Railway and Fly.io Managed Postgres prices were read from official pricing pages and docs on 2026-10-03. Heroku dyno and Postgres prices are from our data set and the Heroku pricing page. Fly.io machine prices and the compute and VPS tables come from our live data set (2026-10-05). Railway figures are estimates at the stated utilisation, converted from per-second rates over a 30-day month; Koyeb instances are priced always-on. Traffic is our “startup” scenario (~74GB/month). None of the PaaS providers in this article pay us; some VPS providers in the DIY table have affiliate links (disclosed in the footer), which never change the ordering.