14 posts tagged with "paas"

Short answer: a preview environment on Hostim is just one more app per pull request. A GitHub workflow deploys pr-42-site and pr-42-api when the PR opens, redeploys them on every push, comments the links on the PR, and deletes both when the PR is closed or merged. On the smallest plan an app costs about €0.0034 an hour, so a two-app preview that lives for two days is around 33 cents.

This came up while I was writing our static site hosting guide. One of the limits I listed was "no deploy previews", and then I sat there looking at it – we bill by the hour, an app takes 30 seconds to create, and deleting it is one command. The feature was already there, it just had no name.

On 1 October 2026 Fly.io raised the price of Machine RAM from $5 to $6 per GB per month. In practice every Machine now costs $1 more per month for each GB of RAM it has. The smallest always-on Machine (shared-cpu-1x, 256 MB) went from $1.94 to $2.19 in Ashburn (iad) and from $2.02 to $2.28 in Amsterdam. A 1 GB Machine went from $5.70 to $6.70 in iad. Volumes, egress, snapshots and IPv4 prices did not change. The regional price differences in Europe are not new: they date from July 2024.

Conflict of interest, stated up front: I run Hostim.dev, a flat-priced container host in Germany. A price rise at Fly is good news for me. So every Fly number below links to Fly's own page or to an archived copy of it, and the comparison at the end says where Fly is the better choice.

Short answer: all three agents deployed the app, unaided, in a sandbox with no hints and no custom instructions file. None of them failed on the platform. They all lost time on the same five rough edges in the CLI and the install script, and those are the interesting part.

We shipped the Hostim CLI this month. It was written with coding agents as first-class users, and dogfooded by deploying 30 open-source apps with it. Then I tested whether that actually works, by handing the job to agents that had never seen it.

Short answer first: the three platforms charge in three different shapes. Render adds a workspace fee for teams on top of fixed instance prices. Railway meters everything per second on top of a small plan fee, and its free plan is tiny. Fly.io is pure pay-as-you-go per second, with no base plan fee at all. The right pick depends less on the headline price and more on which of those shapes fits how you work.

This post explains each model, shows a side-by-side table, and gives the cases where each one wins.

Usage-based pricing always looks cheap on the signup page. "Pay only for what you use." "Starts at $5." Then a few months in, your bill is double what you guessed, and you can't really point at the one thing that did it.

I've been comparing platforms a lot lately – partly because I run one, partly because people keep emailing me to ask whether X or Y is cheaper than Hostim. So here's the actual math on why metered hosting drifts upward over time, and the honest version of when it's the better deal anyway.

Most small teams hit the same question at some point: should we move to Kubernetes? The honest answer for the majority of them is no, but that answer alone is not very helpful. So here is the longer version, with real prices and a clear line where the answer flips to yes.

Heroku just said it's moving to a "sustaining engineering" model.

That's corporate speak for:

• No big new features
• Focus on stability and security
• No new enterprise contracts
• Maintain what exists

Heroku isn't shutting down.

But it's not a growth product anymore.

I haven't posted updates for a while, but several core features landed on Hostim.dev recently.

Instead of shipping from a fixed roadmap, I'm following support-driven (customer-driven) development: features move to the top of the queue once users actively need them.

Over the past month, this resulted in three practical additions around Docker CI/CD, GitHub Actions deployment, and secure bastion host access.

Netlify credits are a prepaid usage unit: builds, bandwidth, and function calls all draw from one balance instead of being billed as separate metrics. Monthly plan credits reset at the start of each billing cycle — the day of the month your team account was created, not the 1st — and unused monthly credits do not roll over, unless you are on a Pro plan with 5,000 or more monthly credits. Credit packs and auto-recharge credits never expire. When the balance reaches zero, every project on the account pauses until the next cycle starts.

📌 Last week, I wrote about Cloud Rent in Action – how layers of middlemen drive up the cost of running a simple SaaS stack. Netlify's new pricing update feels like the same story, playing out live.

When you pay for cloud hosting, you're not just paying for compute. You're paying rent. And it adds up fast.