Hosting & Deployment · decision tool
Cheapest hosting for a side project
At hobby traffic the winner is whichever free/near-free tier covers your bandwidth and requests — priced live, with the cliff where the free tier ends made explicit.
Prices verified 2026-07-15 against official pricing pages · fit weights are our estimates (see methodology) · share the URL to share your configuration
As of Jul 2026, with 20GB bandwidth/month, 0.5 millions requests / month, 0.5 GB server ram needed, a $5 budget for this slot, Vercel ranks first for these inputs at 96% fit and a StackSays-estimated $0/month (Cloudflare (Workers + Pages): 96% fit, $0/month). Fit weights are our estimates; prices trace to official pages. Change any input below and the verdict recomputes.
Your situation
The verdict updates as you move these.
Toss-up — your priorities decide, not the tools
The Next.js home turf — best DX, per-seat pricing and bandwidth overages at scale
vs Cloudflare (Workers + Pages): fit 96% against 96%, est $0 against $0 per month — genuinely close; read both risk lists below
The decision, in plain words
For a solo builder at 20GB bandwidth/month and a $5.00/mo budget for the hosting platform slot, Vercel leads at 96% fit and $0/mo. The two rules doing the work: budget fit (Runs free at your usage — $0 vs your $5/mo budget); batteries included (Bundles preview deploys, zero-ops (managed), global edge — fewer services to glue at team size 1).
Cloudflare (Workers + Pages) is a genuine coin-flip here (96% fit, $0/mo) — read both risk lists and pick the failure mode you prefer.
Honest weak spot of the pick: framework/runtime-coupled platform — leaving means re-architecting build and functions.
Generated from the calculation above — every number traces to the sourced data; nothing here is written by an AI making things up.
Why Vercel scores 96%
How the $0/mo estimate is calculated
What could change this verdict
Cost risk
Official prices verified 2026-07-15; calculation is deterministic code over those prices.
At a glance
| Tool | Free tier | Paid entry | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel | 100GB fast data transfer, 1M invocations, 1 seat | Pro $20/mo | 2026-07-15 |
| Cloudflare (Workers + Pages) | 100K Worker requests/day (~3M/mo), unlimited static requests and bandwidth | Workers Standard $5/mo | 2026-07-15 |
| Netlify | 300 credits/month ≈ 15GB bandwidth equivalent | Pro $20/mo | 2026-07-15 |
| Railway | No free tier | Hobby $5/mo | 2026-07-15 |
| Render | 512MB / 0.1 CPU, 100GB bandwidth | Starter $7/mo | 2026-07-15 |
| Fly.io | No free tier | Pay-as-you-go — shared-cpu-1x 256MB ≈ $2.02/mo → ~$8.08/GB-mo RAM equivalent (machine sizes are granular); NA egress $0.02/GB. Free allowances ended for new accounts Oct 2024 | 2026-07-15 |
| Hetzner Cloud (VPS + Coolify) | No free tier | CX22 VPS $4.99/mo | 2026-07-15 |
Data sources
| Tool | Source | Verified |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Vercel pricing page | 2026-07-15 |
| Cloudflare (Workers + Pages) | Cloudflare Workers pricing docs | 2026-07-15 |
| Netlify | Netlify pricing page | 2026-07-15 |
| Railway | Railway pricing docs | 2026-07-15 |
| Render | Render pricing (via 2026 third-party verification; official page JS-blocked to our monitor) | 2026-07-15 |
| Fly.io | Fly.io pricing docs | 2026-07-15 |
| Hetzner Cloud (VPS + Coolify) | Hetzner Cloud (pricing via 2026 trackers; EUR list price) | 2026-07-15 |
A monitor re-checks these pages for changes; when a vendor moves a price, the date updates and every verdict recomputes.