Fly.io Review 2026: No Free Tier, $2.19 Machines and the Sprites Pivot

The short verdict

Fly.io is a strong fit for developers who are comfortable with a CLI, want their app running in several regions, and will actually read a usage-based bill. It is a weak fit for anyone who needs a hard spending limit, a free hobby tier, phone-speed support without paying for it, or GPUs.

• Best for: multi-region web apps and APIs, latency-sensitive backends, teams that like Docker and a config file over a dashboard.
• Watch out for: no billing caps or alerts, add-on costs (IPv4, volumes, snapshots, egress) that make the headline $2.19 misleading, and regional prices up to 1.6x the US East rate.
• Not for: GPU workloads (sunset 31 July 2026), people who want a free tier, or anyone who needs a guaranteed response from support without a paid plan.

What Fly.io is and how it works

You package an app as a container image, and Fly.io boots it as a hardware-isolated microVM on its own servers. A Machine can be a shared-CPU instance with as little as 256MB of RAM or a performance instance up to 16 vCPUs and 128GB. Each shared vCPU comes with 256MB, each performance vCPU with 2GB, and you pay extra per GB on top.

Deploys usually go through flyctl: fly launch scans your project and writes a fly.toml config, and fly deploy builds and ships it. There is also a dashboard flow that connects an app to a GitHub repository for UI deployments. The 17 regions are Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, Dallas, Secaucus (ewr), Frankfurt, Sao Paulo, Ashburn (iad), Johannesburg, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Chicago, Singapore, San Jose, Sydney and Toronto. Mumbai was removed in September 2026.

Scale to zero by default

Fly.io's docs say autostop/autostart is "what fly launch writes by default": when traffic stops, Machines stop, and the proxy starts them again on the next request. The docs put a cold start at "about 2 seconds or more", while resuming a suspended Machine "takes a few hundred milliseconds". A stopped Machine is not free - you pay $0.15/GB/month for its root filesystem - but that is pennies next to running it.

Private networking

Every app in an organization joins a mesh of WireGuard tunnels over IPv6 that Fly.io calls 6PN, so a web app in Frankfurt can talk to a database in Ashburn without a public endpoint. flyctl can generate WireGuard configs for your laptop or an outside service. Two regions, Johannesburg and Sao Paulo, have no WireGuard gateway of their own.

Machine pricing after the 1 October 2026 increase

Fly.io bills Machines by the second while they run. There is no monthly platform fee, and every organization needs a card on file. These are the 30-day prices in iad and ewr:

• shared-cpu-1x, 256MB: $2.19
• shared-cpu-1x, 512MB: $3.69
• shared-cpu-1x, 1GB: $6.70
• shared-cpu-2x, 512MB: $4.39
• shared-cpu-2x, 2GB: $13.39
• performance-1x, 2GB: $33.00
• performance-2x, 4GB: $66.00
• performance-16x, 32GB: $528.02
• Additional RAM: $6.00/GB/month, up to 128GB

On 1 October 2026 RAM went from $5 to $6 per GB per month. CPU pricing did not change; the bundled RAM simply costs more, so the smallest Machine went from $1.94 to $2.19, a 1GB shared Machine from $5.70 to $6.70, and performance-1x from $31.00 to $33.00. Fly.io changed its pricing docs rather than publishing an announcement we could find; third-party write-ups tie the rise to RAM costs driven by AI demand. Memory-heavy apps feel this most: a Machine that is mostly RAM got close to 20% more expensive overnight.

Reserved compute saves 40%

If your usage is steady, Fly.io sells compute blocks a year in advance at a 40% discount: $36/year buys $5/month of shared compute, $360/year buys $50/month, and $3,600/year buys $500/month. Performance blocks start at $144/year for $20/month. The credit does not roll over, applies only to CPU and additional RAM charges, and is tied to a region.

The costs that are not on the Machine price

The $2.19 figure is real, but a production app almost always pays for more than a Machine. These are the line items to budget for:

• Volumes: $0.15/GB/month on provisioned capacity, including while detached or attached to a stopped Machine.
• Volume snapshots: $0.08/GB/month after the first 10GB each month. Daily snapshots with 5-day retention are on by default, and Fly.io started charging for them on 1 January 2026.
• Outbound bandwidth: $0.02/GB in North America and Europe, $0.04/GB in Asia Pacific, Oceania and South America, $0.12/GB in Africa and India. Inbound is free.
• Cross-region private traffic: $0.006/GB in North America and Europe, up to $0.050/GB in Africa and India. Same-region traffic is free.
• Dedicated IPv4: $2/month. A shared IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are free.
• Static egress IP: $0.005/hour, about $3.60/month.
• TLS certificates: first 10 single-hostname certificates free, then $0.10/month each; wildcards $1/month.
• Fly Kubernetes: $75/month per cluster, plus compute and volumes.
• Extensions such as Tigris and Upstash: the provider's list price, billed on your Fly.io invoice.

Regions are not priced the same

The iad price is the cheapest. Other regions apply a multiplier: Amsterdam and Stockholm 1.038x, Toronto 1.115x, London and Paris 1.135x, Frankfurt 1.154x, San Jose 1.192x, Los Angeles 1.2x, Chicago and Dallas 1.25x, Singapore and Sydney 1.269x, Johannesburg 1.303x, Tokyo 1.308x and Sao Paulo 1.615x. Fly.io's own examples put a 1GB shared Machine at $7.73 in Frankfurt and $8.50 in Singapore. Fly.io corrected wrong multipliers in its docs in late September 2026 (Tokyo had been listed at 2.0x), so recheck any calculator you built before then.

Free trial, no free tier

Fly.io's marketing says "Start for free, pay as you grow", but its pricing docs are blunt: "New organizations don't have a free tier or a monthly free usage allowance." What you get instead is a trial: 2 hours of Machine runtime or 7 days, whichever comes first.

• No credit card needed to start the trial.
• Trial Machines stop automatically after 5 minutes of running.
• Limits: 10 Machines, 20GB of volume storage, up to 2 vCPUs and 4GB of RAM per Machine.
• Not included: dedicated IPv4 addresses and performance vCPUs.
• Adding a card ends the trial immediately and starts billing.
• If the trial ends without a card, apps stop and you cannot deploy until billing is set up.

Two hours is enough to see a deploy work, not enough to evaluate a real app. Some things stay free after the trial: inbound transfer, shared IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, the first 10 certificates and the first 10GB of snapshot storage each month.

Legacy plans and the under-$5 waiver

Fly.io stopped selling its Hobby ($5/month), Launch and Scale ($29/month) plans on 7 October 2024. Organizations that bought Launch or Scale before then keep their allowances - up to three 256MB shared Machines, 3GB of volumes and 100GB of North America and Europe egress - unless they switch to Pay As You Go or remove their card. Separately, a Fly.io staff member said on the community forum in November 2025 that bills under $5 are waived for your personal organization only. That is a forum statement, not something in the docs or terms, so do not plan a budget around it.

What a real app costs per month

Two examples at current iad prices, rounded to the cent:

A side project

One shared-cpu-1x 256MB Machine running all month is $2.19. With the free shared IPv4, a free certificate and a few GB of egress, the bill stays around $2.20 to $2.50. Let it scale to zero and it can be lower still, at the cost of a cold start of a couple of seconds on the first request.

A small production app

• Two shared-cpu-1x 1GB Machines for redundancy: $13.40
• Dedicated IPv4: $2.00
• 100GB of North America outbound traffic: $2.00
• Managed Postgres Basic: $38.00
• 10GB of Postgres storage at $0.28/GB: $2.80
• Total: about $58.20 per month

Run the same two Machines in Frankfurt and they cost $15.46 instead of $13.40. Before 1 October they would have been $11.40 in iad. The database is two-thirds of this bill - which is the honest shape of most small production setups on Fly.io now that unmanaged Postgres is unsupported.

Managed Postgres

Managed Postgres (MPG) is the supported database. Fly.io's docs list five plans per month:

• Basic, Shared-2x, 1GB RAM: $38.00
• Starter, Shared-2x, 2GB RAM: $72.00
• Launch, Performance-2x, 8GB RAM: $282.00
• Scale, Performance-4x, 32GB RAM: $962.00
• Performance, Performance-8x, 64GB RAM: $1,922.00

Storage is billed on usage at $0.28/GB per 30 days, up to 1TB, with up to 500GB at creation. Every plan includes high availability, backups and connection pooling. Since February 2026, inter-region private traffic from MPG is charged at the same rate as Machines. MPG runs in 12 regions; Stockholm, Paris, Secaucus and Johannesburg are not among them.

The old fly postgres route still exists, now labelled "Unmanaged Fly Postgres (Unsupported)". Fly.io estimates about $2/month for a single node or $82 to $164/month for a three-node cluster, but support will not help you with it, and LiteFS is on the same unsupported list. Treat both as do-it-yourself.

Billing: no caps, no alerts, refunds by request

This is the part of Fly.io that deserves the most attention. Its cost-management docs say: "there's no soft ceiling. If you go over, we'll bill you. We don't support billing alerts (yet), so budget accordingly." A traffic spike, a runaway autoscale or a forgotten performance Machine is billed in full.

• Billing is monthly per organization through Stripe, with a card pre-authorisation usually under US$10.
• Prepaid credits have a $25 minimum purchase.
• Refunds are case by case: Fly.io says it is happy to discuss one for resources created by mistake or traffic from an attack, via [email protected].
• The terms of service (effective 29 April 2026) allow suspension for unpaid fees and charge 1.5% per month interest on late amounts.

Reliability in 2026

Fly.io runs its own hardware and network, and its status page is busy. The RSS feed lists 59 items between roughly August and October 2026. Recent incidents by title:

• 26 October: Packet loss in IAD
• 25 October: MPGv2 IAD control plane is read-only
• 22 October: Degraded Edge Performance
• 20 October: Capacity issues in GRU region
• 17 October: Platform Wide Rolling Host Reboots
• 11 October: Sprite hosting outage
• 3 October: Partial outage in AMS
• 26 September: Network outage in AMS region
• 24 September: Private Networking issues (6PN)
• 12 September: Network issues in US West Coast
• 31 August: HTTP/2 traffic disruptions

Many of these are regional and short, and Fly.io is unusually open about them - its infra log in March 2026 described a certificate vault failure that took proxies down, a BGP route leak that sent North American traffic to Singapore, and app-scoped IPs deleted by mistake. Openness is good; the frequency is a reason to run at least two Machines, preferably in two regions, for anything that matters.

Support plans

Community forum support is free. Email support through the Support Portal is for paid support plans, legacy Launch and Scale orgs, and MPG customers on database issues.

• Standard, $29/month: 36-hour first response target.
• Premium, $199/month: 24-hour first response, 1 hour for urgent issues, a dedicated Slack channel.
• Enterprise, from $2,500/month: 4-hour first response 24x7, 15-minute emergency response and a 99.9% uptime SLA.

Fly.io publishes its real numbers, which beat the targets: over the last 30 days it answered the median ticket in 1 hour 7 minutes, with Standard at 40% within an hour and 95% within 24 hours, and Premium and Enterprise at 100% within 24 hours. Note that only Enterprise carries an uptime SLA.

Sprites, the new CEO and what was cut

In July 2026 Fly.io raised more money, named Scott Johnston as CEO and said "Computers for Agents are, going forward, the focus of our company." Those computers are Sprites: sandboxed machines for AI agents priced at $0.0385 per CPU-hour and $0.021875 per GB-hour of memory, with no plans or per-Sprite fees. The same post said "Fly Machines and our Platform As A Service features aren't going anywhere", and staff repeated "machines are staying!" on the forum.

We take that at face value, but the pattern this year is a company trimming what it no longer prioritises: GPUs were fully deprecated on 31 July 2026, the Mumbai region closed in September, LiteFS and unmanaged Postgres are unsupported, and RAM prices rose. On the positive side, Fly.io keeps shipping for builders - Litestream VFS with write support in January, and on 23 October a beta MCP server at mcp.fly.io that lets AI tools manage your apps, Machines, volumes and Sprites.

For a buyer this is a medium-term risk, not a reason to panic: keep your app portable (it is a container already), keep backups outside Fly.io, and avoid features the company has marked unsupported.

Security and compliance

Fly.io says it is SOC 2 Type 2 audited, runs hardware in ISO 27001 datacenters and will sign a BAA for HIPAA workloads. The BAA is pre-signed by Fly.io and becomes active when you sign it; a DPA is also available. Fly.io does not publish a price for the BAA, so ask before you commit a regulated workload. Microvm isolation per Machine is a real security advantage over container-sharing platforms.

Who should use Fly.io

• Yes: developers deploying a Dockerised app to two or more regions, with a modest budget and a habit of reading invoices.
• Yes: teams that want private networking across regions without building a VPN.
• Maybe: small production apps that need a database - the $38 MPG floor changes the maths against platforms with bundled databases.
• No: anyone who needs a spending cap, a free tier for hobby projects, or GPUs.
• No: teams that want guaranteed support response without paying at least $29/month.

Frequently asked questions

Does Fly.io have a free tier?

No. New organizations get a trial of 2 Machine hours or 7 days, whichever ends first. After that every running Machine is billed, though inbound traffic, shared IPv4, IPv6, the first 10 certificates and 10GB of snapshots stay free.

What is the cheapest app I can run on Fly.io?

A shared-cpu-1x Machine with 256MB of RAM costs $2.19 per 30 days in iad and ewr. Other regions cost up to 1.615x more, and a dedicated IPv4, volumes or egress add to it.

Can I set a spending limit on Fly.io?

No. Fly.io has no spending caps and no billing alerts. You control cost through autostop, Machine counts and Machine sizes, and by watching usage yourself.

Will Fly.io refund an unexpected bill?

Possibly, at its discretion. Fly.io says it will discuss refunds for resources created by mistake or traffic from an attack if you email [email protected], but there is no automatic refund policy.

How much does Managed Postgres cost?

From $38/month for the Basic plan with 1GB of RAM, plus storage at $0.28/GB per 30 days. Plans go up to $1,922/month, and all include high availability, backups and connection pooling.

Is Fly.io shutting down Machines?

No. Fly.io says Machines and its platform features are not going anywhere, even though its stated focus since July 2026 is Sprites for AI agents. GPUs, however, were retired on 31 July 2026.

What support do I get without a paid plan?

Community forum support only. Email support starts with the $29/month Standard plan, except for MPG issues and legacy Launch or Scale organizations.

Why do other sites list a $1.94 Machine?

That was the price before 1 October 2026, when RAM went from $5 to $6 per GB per month. The current smallest Machine costs $2.19.

Key takeaways

• Fly.io has no free tier: a 2-hour or 7-day trial, then pay-as-you-go with a card on file.
• The smallest always-on Machine is $2.19 per 30 days after the 1 October 2026 RAM increase from $5 to $6/GB.
• Budget for IPv4, volumes, snapshots, egress and regional multipliers up to 1.615x on top of Machine prices.
• Managed Postgres starts at $38/month; unmanaged Postgres and LiteFS are unsupported.
• There are no spending caps or billing alerts, and refunds are discretionary.
• Machines remain supported, but the company now focuses on Sprites and has cut GPUs and the Mumbai region.