Vercel alternatives, priced on the same traffic
Netlify, Railway, Render, Fly.io, Cloudflare Workers and DigitalOcean App Platform priced against Vercel on identical traffic at 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 users.
| Service | Plan at 10,000 users | 1,000 users | 10,000 users | 100,000 users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VercelThe Next.js host. Zero-config, and the bill is entirely usage-shaped. | Pro3 Aug 2026 | $20 | $20 | $175 |
| Cloudflare WorkersEdge functions with no egress charge at all. | Workers Free3 Aug 2026 | $0 | $0 | $10 |
| NetlifyThe other Jamstack host, priced per member rather than per project. | Pro3 Aug 2026 | $0 | $20 | not published |
| RailwayContainers billed by the second, with a database next to them. | Hobby3 Aug 2026 | $21 | $31 | $128 |
| RenderPredictable instance sizes — the closest thing left to old Heroku. | Hobby3 Aug 2026 | $2.25 | $29 | $75 |
| Fly.ioMicro-VMs you place in specific regions, billed by the second. | Pay as you go3 Aug 2026 | $2.99 | $19 | $176 |
| DigitalOcean App PlatformFlat-rate app containers with a predictable monthly number. | Basic3 Aug 2026 | $5.00 | $7.00 | $43 |
Change any of those assumptions in the calculator.
Where this actually starts
People leave Vercel for one of two reasons, and they lead to different places. Either the bill grew in a way they could not predict, or they needed a process that stays running.
The table prices all of them on the same traffic. The interesting column is not the cheapest — it is how differently each one responds when you raise the bandwidth.
What actually separates them
Egress is the whole story
Vercel charges $0.15/GB for fast data transfer above the 1 TB included on Pro. Cloudflare charges nothing for egress on Workers, at any volume. For a JSON-heavy app this is irrelevant; for anything serving images, audio or video it is the entire difference between the two bills.
Serverless against a process that stays up
Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare run your code per request. Railway, Render, Fly.io and DigitalOcean run a container that stays alive. If you need websockets, a job queue or a background worker, the second group is not an optimisation, it is a requirement — and it is why the "serverless is cheaper" argument stops applying.
Predictable against metered
Render and DigitalOcean sell instance sizes: you pick $25/mo and that is what it costs. Railway and Fly.io bill by the second of actual usage. Vercel meters roughly a dozen separate dimensions. All three models are defensible; only one of them can surprise you in the middle of a launch.
The Next.js tax
Vercel builds the framework, and the newest features land there first and work best there. Everywhere else you are running an adapter. This has got much better, but "it works on Vercel" and "it works everywhere" are still not the same statement on the day a new Next.js version ships.
Which to pick
| If | Then |
|---|---|
| A Next.js app that mostly serves HTML and JSON | Stay on Vercel — the $20 of included usage absorbs the metered lines for a long time. |
| You serve real media | Cloudflare Workers — free egress is a different pricing model, not a discount. |
| You need a long-running process | Railway for per-second billing, Render if you would rather pick a fixed instance size. |
Questions
Why does Vercel Hobby not appear as the cheapest option?
Because it is non-commercial only. A plan that forbids the thing you are doing is excluded before price is considered — recommending it to someone charging money for their app would be recommending a terms-of-service violation.
Is self-hosting cheaper?
On the invoice, usually yes. The comparison this page cannot make for you is the cost of your own time doing the parts these platforms do — deploys, TLS, rollbacks, scaling and the 3am page. That is a real cost that does not appear on any pricing page.
