Is Fly.io free? The free allowance, the trial, and what it costs
Quick answer
No. Fly.io's pricing docs, read November 5, 2026, say “New organizations don't have a free tier or a monthly free usage allowance.” New accounts get $1 of credit for 7 days, with no card. The smallest always-on Machine costs $2.19 per 30 days, and Fly.io's pricing page says “Invoices under $5 are waived.”
Free plan: no credit card, 1 published page, 10,000 page views a month included.
On this page
- The short answer
- What changed on Fly.io, and when
- The Fly.io free trial
- What a small app costs on Fly.io
- Auto-stop, and what you still pay for
- Case by case: what Fly.io gives you for free
- Postgres on Fly.io
- Can you use Fly.io for a business?
- When you only need a page
- Free alternatives to Fly.io, compared
- Frequently asked questions
- Sources
No. Fly.io's Resource Pricing docs, read on November 5, 2026, answer “Is there a free tier?” with “No. New organizations don't have a free tier or a monthly free usage allowance.” New accounts get a trial instead: “$1 of credit for Machines, Sprites and Managed Postgres, which lasts for 7 days or until you use it up,” and “You don't need a credit card to start the trial.”
After the trial, Fly.io bills for what you run, with “no monthly platform fee.” The smallest always-on app on Fly.io, a shared-cpu-1x Machine with 256MB of RAM in its lowest-priced regions, “costs $2.19 per 30 days of continuous runtime.” Fly.io's pricing page adds: “Invoices under $5 are waived.” The free allowances older answers quote, “Up to 3 shared-cpu-1x 256mb VMs,” come with plans Fly.io stopped selling on October 7, 2024, and only organizations that were on those plans keep them, per its Discontinued Plans docs.
As of November 5, 2026, 11:32 to 11:36 JST (02:32 to 02:36 UTC). Fly.io's docs and pricing page show no date on the page, so each fact on this page is from the version read that day; the date each doc last changed, from its page data, is in the Sources. The trial changed between November 3 and 4, 2026: an Internet Archive copy of the trial doc from November 3 still said a trial “includes 2 hours of machine runtime or 7 days of access, whichever comes first,” and the doc's page data dates its last change November 4. Prices are Fly.io's, in US dollars. Check them before you deploy.
This page covers Fly.io's own plans: what changed and when, the trial, what a small app costs, and what still bills when a Machine is stopped. Is Heroku free? does the same for Heroku, and Is Render free for production? and Railway's free plan and trial cover the hosts that still run server code on a free plan.
The short answer
- Free tier: none for new organizations. Fly.io moved new organizations to Pay As You Go in 2024 and stopped selling its Hobby, Launch, and Scale plans on October 7, 2024.
- The trial: Fly.io gives a new account $1 of credit for 7 days, with no card. Trial Machines stop after 5 minutes of running.
- After the trial: Fly.io needs a credit card before your Machines start again.
- The smallest app: Fly.io's shared-cpu-1x Machine with 256MB of RAM costs $2.19 per 30 days running all the time, in Ashburn (iad) or Secaucus (ewr). Other regions cost more.
- Small bills: Fly.io's pricing page says “Invoices under $5 are waived.”
- The old free allowances: 3 shared-cpu-1x 256mb VMs, 3GB of volumes, and 100 GB of outbound data in North America and Europe, kept only by organizations that were on the discontinued plans.
What changed on Fly.io, and when
Most of what older tutorials and AI answers say about Fly.io's “free tier” describes the plans before October 2024. Here is each change, in Fly.io's words:
| When | What Fly.io changed | Fly.io's source |
|---|---|---|
| January 2024 | “Back in January we started charging $5/mo minimum for new Fly.io organizations,” from Fly.io's email, quoted by its staff on July 2, 2024 | Free tier is dead? (community forum) |
| June 17, 2024 | “new organisations will be placed on our new Pay As You Go plan,” with “no minimum commitment” | Pay As You Go Plan (Fresh Produce, by a Fly.io employee) |
| October 7, 2024 | “Fly.io stopped selling Hobby, Launch, and Scale plans on October 7, 2024.” Their free allowances “are still honored for any organizations that were on these plans before we sunset them” | Discontinued Plans |
| November 10, 2025 | A legacy Hobby organization that converts to Pay As You Go converts at once, and “All free allowances that come with the Hobby plans will end” | Convert from legacy Hobby plans (Fresh Produce, by Fly.io staff) |
| Between November 3 and 4, 2026 | The trial became “$1 of free credit” that “lasts for 7 days or until you use it up.” On November 3, the same doc said “2 hours of machine runtime or 7 days of access, whichever comes first” | Free trial; Internet Archive copy of November 3 |
So the “3 free VMs” are the legacy allowances: “Up to 3 shared-cpu-1x 256mb VMs,” “3GB persistent volume storage (total),” and 100 GB of outbound data in North America and Europe, 30 GB elsewhere. A new account doesn't get them. A Launch or Scale plan bought before October 7, 2024 stays “unless you convert to Pay As You Go, delete your payment method, or otherwise stop using Fly.io,” and an organization that leaves the Legacy Hobby plan “won't be able to return” to it.
The Fly.io free trial
Fly.io's free trial docs: “New accounts get $1 of free credit, with no credit card required. You can spend it on Machines, Sprites and Managed Postgres. The credit lasts for 7 days or until you use it up, whichever comes first.” It applies to your personal organization, the one Fly.io creates at sign-up.
Until you add a card, the trial has limits:
- Machines: up to 10 at a time across the organization, stopped ones included, up to shared-cpu-2x with 4GB of memory.
- Run time: “Trial Machines stop automatically after running for 5 minutes.”
- Storage: up to 20GB of volumes in total, and up to 3 Sprites at a time.
- Not in the trial: performance-optimized vCPUs, dedicated IPv4 addresses, and extensions such as Tigris, Supabase, and Upstash Redis. You can create a Managed Postgres cluster, “but it uses up the $1 credit quickly.”
- 2 Machines per app: “fly deploy creates 2 Machines per app by default, so 10 Machines covers 5 apps.” Run
fly deploy --ha=falsefor 1 Machine per app.
When the credit runs out or the 7 days end, “your Machines stay stopped, and you can't start them or create new resources until you add a credit card.” Fly.io emails you, and if you don't add a card, it “may delete your trial resources”: Machines, volumes, and Sprites. “Your apps are kept, so you can deploy them again after you add a card.” Adding a card lifts the limits, and any credit left still applies.
What a small app costs on Fly.io
Fly.io prices each resource, with no plan to pick. These are the lines a small app uses, from Fly.io's Resource Pricing docs. Machine prices are for Ashburn, Virginia (iad) and Secaucus, NJ (ewr), which Fly.io calls “our lowest-priced regions,” and assume 30 days of running: “Machine prices vary by region.”
| What you pay for | Fly.io's price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Machine, shared-cpu-1x, 256MB | $2.19 per 30 days | “Smallest Machine size. Billed by the second while running” |
| Machine, shared-cpu-1x, 512MB | $3.69 per 30 days | |
| Machine, shared-cpu-1x, 1GB | $6.70 per 30 days | |
| A stopped or suspended Machine | $0.15 per GB of root file system, per 30 days | “Only the Machine's root file system is billed while it's stopped” |
| Volume | $0.15 per GB per month | Billed on provisioned size, “including while detached or attached to a stopped Machine” |
| Dedicated IPv4 address | $2 per month | Optional; a shared IPv4 address and IPv6 addresses are free |
| SSL certificate | $0.10 per month per hostname | “First 10 single-hostname certificates are free” |
| Outbound data | $0.02 per GB in North America and Europe | $0.04 in Asia Pacific, Oceania, and South America; $0.12 in Africa and India; inbound is free |
| Builds and image storage | No charge | “currently free”; Fly.io says it will give notice before charging |
Fly.io's own examples, running all month in Ashburn: “A Discord bot or background worker running 24/7” on a 256MB Machine comes to $2.21 with 1GB of outbound data, and “A small web app with Managed Postgres” comes to $43.67, of which the Basic database plan is $38. 2 Machines per app, as fly deploy creates by default, cost $4.38 a month at the smallest size if both run all month, by this page's arithmetic.
On bills under $5, Fly.io's pricing page says “Invoices under $5 are waived.” Its billing docs don't mention it, and the pricing page doesn't say which organizations it covers. Fly.io also has no spending cap: its cost management docs say “Free allowances don't cap your bill,” “there's no soft ceiling,” and “We don't support billing alerts (yet).”
Auto-stop, and what you still pay for
A stopped Machine costs less, not nothing. Fly.io's autostop/autostart docs say “A stopped or suspended Machine isn't billed for CPU or RAM. You pay only for its root file system (rootfs), at $0.15/GB for 30 days. A volume is billed for its full provisioned size whether its Machine is running or not.” Scale to zero, where Fly Proxy stops every Machine with no traffic and starts one on the next request, is what fly launch “writes by default.”
- The wake-up: “A cold start takes about 2 seconds or more for common apps.” With
auto_stop_machines = "suspend", “Resuming a suspended Machine takes a few hundred milliseconds.” - What idle costs: Fly.io's example, a 512MB Machine in Ashburn that runs 2 hours a day, costs $0.45 a month without a volume and $1.95 with a 10GB volume.
- What keeps billing: Fly.io bills volumes, each dedicated IPv4 address at $2 a month, and Managed Postgres, which lives outside your apps: “Deleting an app won't delete its database.”
Fly.io's cost management docs recommend “budgeting for the ‘always-on’ cost,” since “any random request might spin a machine up again.”
Case by case: what Fly.io gives you for free
The table applies Fly.io's docs, pricing page, terms, and community announcements, as read on November 5, 2026, to what people ask before they deploy. A row reads Yes where Fly.io's pages allow it, No where they rule it out or put a price on it, and “Fly.io doesn't say” where they don't settle the case.
| What you want to do | What Fly.io's pages say | Fly.io's answer |
|---|---|---|
| Get a free tier on a new account | “No. New organizations don't have a free tier or a monthly free usage allowance.” (pricing docs) | No |
| Start the trial without a card | “New accounts get $1 of free credit, with no credit card required.” (free trial) | Yes |
| Run a trial Machine for more than 5 minutes | “Trial Machines stop automatically after running for 5 minutes.” (free trial) | No |
| Keep apps running after the trial without a card | “your Machines stay stopped, and you can't start them or create new resources until you add a credit card” (free trial) | No |
| Keep the old Hobby free allowances | “still honored for any organizations that were on these plans before we sunset them” (Discontinued Plans) | Yes, on an organization that had them before October 7, 2024 |
| Run the smallest Machine all month for under $5 | “$2.19 per 30 days of continuous runtime” in iad or ewr (pricing docs) | Yes |
| Pay nothing for an invoice under $5 | “Invoices under $5 are waived.” (pricing page); the billing docs don't mention it | Yes, per the pricing page |
| Pay nothing for a stopped Machine | “$0.15/GB/month of rootfs,” and volumes bill “including while detached or attached to a stopped Machine” (pricing docs) | No |
| Get a free Postgres database | Managed Postgres costs “$38/month (Basic) to $1,922/month (Performance)”; unmanaged Fly Postgres is listed under “Unsupported Products” (pricing docs) | No |
| Host a static site for free | The static site guide runs nginx as “a web server running in a VM” (static website); the smallest Machine costs “$2.19 per 30 days of continuous runtime” (pricing docs); the pricing page says “Invoices under $5 are waived” and doesn't say which organizations that covers (pricing page) | Fly.io doesn't say |
| Build and deploy without paying for builds | “There's currently no charge for builders.” (pricing docs) | Yes |
| Use Fly.io for your own business | The terms grant use “solely for Customer's internal use” and set no personal-use limit (Terms of Service, effective April 29, 2026) | Yes |
| Host an app you build for a client | The terms bar using the services “for the benefit of a third party” and don't say how that applies to client work (Terms of Service) | Fly.io doesn't say |
| Cap your spending | “there's no soft ceiling. If you go over, we'll bill you.” (cost management) | No |
Postgres on Fly.io
Fly.io has no free database. Its pricing page lists Managed Postgres plans from Basic, a shared-2x cluster with 1GB, at $38 a month, up to Performance at $1,922 a month, plus $0.28 per GB of storage, “Billed on the storage your databases use, for a 30-day month.” “Every plan includes high availability, automated backups and connection pooling.” The trial can create a cluster, but it “uses up the $1 credit quickly.”
The cheaper route is Fly Postgres, which runs as an app of your own Machines and volumes. Fly.io lists it under “Unsupported Products” as “a PostgreSQL database that you create and then manage yourself,” at “about $2/month for a single node cluster for dev projects” on Fly.io if it runs all the time. For a database your customers rely on, Fly.io's supported choice is Managed Postgres.
Can you use Fly.io for a business?
Yes, for your own. Fly.io's Terms of Service, effective April 29, 2026, bind “you or the entity you represent” and grant a subscription “solely for Customer's internal use.” They set no personal-use or non-commercial limit, and there's no plan rule either: “Fly.io no longer offers plans to new customers,” per its Discontinued Plans docs. Its pricing page describes Standard support as “Great for personal projects and startups” and offers a startup program of “Up to $15,000 in credit for eligible early-stage companies.”
The open case is client work. The terms say you won't “sublicense any of Customer's rights under this Agreement, or otherwise use the Fly.io Services for the benefit of a third party.” Fly.io doesn't say whether an app you build and host for a client is that. Ask Fly.io before you bill a client for hosting on your account.
When you only need a page
If what you'd deploy is a landing page, a portfolio, a sign-up form, or one HTML file a person or an AI wrote, Fly.io still runs it on a Machine: its static website guide puts the files in an nginx image, “a web server running in a VM.” That's $2.19 per 30 days on Fly.io for the smallest Machine running all the time, less with auto-stop, plus a card after the trial. Fly.io's pricing page also says “Invoices under $5 are waived,” and doesn't say which organizations that covers.
Convika hosts that kind of page, and not an app server. It takes one .html or .htm file of up to 2 MB, or pasted code, and puts it on your subdomain.
- A form that keeps the entries. Click Add a form to my page, and Convika adds a form that stores each entry, emails it to you, and exports to CSV. Free shows 50 entries a month and keeps later ones for Pro.
- Visitor stats on Free. You get 90 days of visits, referrers, UTM campaigns, devices, countries, and button clicks.
- No Machine to start. Convika serves each published page from storage on every request, so there's no cold start and no root file system to pay for.
- No card. The Free plan doesn't ask for one, and commercial use is allowed on every plan, per section 7 of the terms.
Free includes 1 published page and 10,000 page views a month, with a small Convika bar at the bottom. Once your pages reach 10,000 page views in a month, editing and analytics pause, and 7 days later the pages stop until the month ends or you upgrade.
Where Fly.io fits better: containers, server code, databases, background workers, and apps in several regions. Convika doesn't run your backend or host Postgres, so the API and its data stay on Fly.io or another host.
Drop the .html file right below or paste its code to see your page on Convika before signing up. You get a private preview link that works for 3 minutes, with the page's scripts and forms off until you keep it with a free account. The same box is on the free HTML publishing tool.
Free alternatives to Fly.io, compared
The other hosts' rows come from their pages on convika.com, whose sources were read between October 23 and November 5, 2026. Follow each link for the quotes and the sources.
| Host and free plan | Server code on free | What stops a free app | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fly.io | Only on the trial, or on a legacy plan | $1 of trial credit for 7 days; trial Machines stop after 5 minutes | This page |
| Heroku | No, since November 28, 2022 | No free dyno; Eco costs money and sleeps after 30 minutes | Is Heroku free? |
| Render, free instances | Yes, free web services | Spin-down after 15 minutes idle, 750 instance hours a month, and Postgres that expires after 30 days | Is Render free for production? |
| Railway | Yes, on the trial and the Free plan | A one-time $5 for up to 30 days, then $1 of credit each month | Railway's free plan and trial |
| Cloudflare Workers Free | Yes, Workers | 100,000 requests a day and 10 ms of CPU per request; past the daily limit, Error 1027 | Cloudflare Workers free plan limits |
| Vercel Hobby | Yes, Functions | Business use: “non-commercial personal use only.” Past a usage limit, in most cases you wait 30 days | Vercel Hobby limits |
| Netlify Free | Yes, functions | 300 credits a month shared by deploys, bandwidth, and functions; at zero, every project pauses | Is Netlify free? |
| Convika Free | No, HTML pages only | 10,000 page views a month | The section above |
Free hosting traffic limits compared sets the free plans' traffic caps side by side, and free hosting for a business site compares 4 hosts' terms on business use. AWS Amplify has no lasting free tier either: Is AWS Amplify free? explains the AWS Free Tier credits it runs on, for up to 6 months on AWS's Free plan.
Frequently asked questions
Is Fly.io still free?
No. Fly.io's pricing docs say “New organizations don't have a free tier or a monthly free usage allowance.” A new account gets $1 of trial credit for 7 days, with no card, and then pays for what it runs. Only organizations that were on the Hobby, Launch, or Scale plans before October 7, 2024 keep their old free allowances.
Is Fly.io free to deploy?
Yes for the deploy itself. Fly.io says “There's currently no charge for builders,” and storing images in its registry is free too. The Machines your app runs on bill by the second, from $2.19 per 30 days on Fly.io for the smallest one in its cheapest regions. Fly.io's pricing page says “Invoices under $5 are waived,” and doesn't say which organizations that covers.
How long is the Fly.io free trial?
7 days, or until the $1 credit runs out, whichever comes first. Fly.io's trial needs no card, but its Machines stop after 5 minutes of running. When the trial ends, your Machines stay stopped until you add a card, and Fly.io may delete trial Machines, volumes, and Sprites while keeping your apps.
Do I need a credit card for Fly.io?
Not to start. Fly.io's trial gives new accounts $1 of credit “with no credit card required.” To keep using Fly.io after the trial, or to lift the trial's limits sooner, you add a card from the dashboard. Fly.io's billing docs add that if you don't have a card, you can buy credits instead, from $25.
Does Fly.io still give 3 free VMs?
No, not to new accounts. “Up to 3 shared-cpu-1x 256mb VMs” are among the legacy free allowances of the Hobby, Launch, and Scale plans, which Fly.io stopped selling on October 7, 2024. Organizations that were on those plans keep them until they convert to Pay As You Go.
How much does the cheapest Fly.io app cost?
$2.19 per 30 days on Fly.io, for a shared-cpu-1x Machine with 256MB of RAM running all the time in Ashburn or Secaucus, plus outbound data at $0.02 per GB in North America and Europe. Other regions cost more. With auto-stop, a mostly idle app costs less, and a stopped Machine still bills $0.15 per GB of its root file system.
Does Fly.io waive small invoices?
Yes, per its pricing page, which says “Invoices under $5 are waived.” Fly.io's billing docs don't mention the waiver, and the pricing page doesn't say which organizations it covers, so check your invoice preview in the dashboard. Fly.io has no spending cap or billing alerts.
Does Fly.io have free Postgres?
No. Fly.io's Managed Postgres starts at $38 a month for the Basic plan, plus $0.28 per GB of storage. Unmanaged Fly Postgres runs on your own Machines for about $2 a month as a single node, and Fly.io lists it as unsupported.
Sources
Each source was read on November 5, 2026, between 11:32 and 11:36 JST (02:32 and 02:36 UTC). Fly.io's docs show no date on the page; the dates in parentheses are each doc's last change in its page data.
- Fly.io Resource Pricing (changed November 4, 2026; read 11:32)
- Fly.io Free Trial (changed November 4, 2026; read 11:32) and its Internet Archive copy of November 3, 2026 (doc changed October 15, 2026; read 11:35)
- Fly.io pricing page (no date on the page; read 11:32)
- Fly.io Discontinued Plans (changed October 21, 2026; read 11:33)
- Fly.io Billing (changed October 27, 2026; read 11:32) and Cost Management (changed November 4, 2026; read 11:32)
- Fly.io Autostop/autostart Machines (changed October 22, 2026; read 11:32)
- Fly.io Managed Postgres (changed October 15, 2026; read 11:32)
- Fly.io: Deploy a Static Website (changed October 13, 2026; read 11:32)
- Fly.io Terms of Service (effective April 29, 2026; read 11:32)
- Fly.io community forum: Pay As You Go Plan (June 17, 2024), Free tier is dead? (staff reply of July 2, 2024), and convert from legacy Hobby plans (November 10, 2025); read 11:34
Next step
How to share an HTML file as a link that opens on any phone
Upload the file to a host and send its link; email and Google Drive send the code. 8 hosts compared, from Netlify Drop to Convika, with 4 steps.
Related articles
- Is Heroku free? What replaced the free tier, and the cheapest plan nowNo: Heroku ended free dynos and free Postgres on November 28, 2022. Eco costs $5 a month for 1,000 hours and sleeps; students get $13 a month for 24 months.
- Can you run a production app on Render's free tier?No: Render's docs say “Do not use them for production applications.” A free web service spins down after 15 minutes, and free Postgres expires in 30 days.
- Can you use Railway's free plan or trial for a commercial or client site?Yes for your own business: Railway's terms allow “business use” and send client sites to a Pro workspace. Its Free plan has $1 a month and no custom domain.
- Cloudflare Workers free plan in 2026: limits, and what happens past themCloudflare Workers Free allows 100,000 requests a day and 10 ms of CPU per request, and static assets are free and unlimited. Error 1027, Workers AI, and Paid.
- What happens to a free website when it gets too much traffic? Limits comparedTraffic limits of 8 free hosts, GitHub Pages, Netlify, and Vercel included: whether a viral page stops, slows, or gets billed, and how to keep it up.
- Which free hosting lets me run a business site? GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages: what each one's terms sayNetlify Free and Cloudflare Pages allow a business site; GitHub Pages and Vercel Hobby don't. Each host's rule, quoted and dated, across 10 kinds of site.
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