Pricing · Updated 10 November 2026 · 9 min read

How to estimate the monthly hosting cost of a web app in 2026

A five-step method to price one app across Render, Railway, Scalingo, Sliplane, Vercel, Cloudflare and Eurobase, with a worked example you can copy.

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Start from what your app actually consumes in a month: how many services stay running and how much memory each holds, the database, outbound traffic, storage, build minutes and seats. Then price those quantities on each platform's own rate card, add the fixed fees and VAT, and run the numbers a second time for a month with five to ten times the traffic.

In the worked example below, one web service and one small database come to roughly €10 to €30 a month on the managed platforms compared. The spread comes from the database and from how each provider counts memory and traffic, not from the headline plan price.

The cost lines at a glance

Cost line	What drives it	Example rate from a provider's page
Always-on compute	Memory and CPU held every hour of the month	Railway: $10 per GB of RAM and $20 per vCPU a month
Fixed-size instance	One price per instance size	Render: $7 a month for 512 MB; Scalingo: €7.20 a month for 256 MB, excl. VAT
Server you fill yourself	One price per server, any number of services on it	Sliplane: €9 for 1 vCPU and 1 GB, excl. VAT
Requests and CPU time	Traffic that reaches your code	Cloudflare Workers Paid: $5 a month, then $0.30 per million requests and $0.02 per million CPU ms
Database	Instance size and storage	Render Postgres: $19 a month for 1 GB of RAM; Scalingo Postgres: €7.20 a month for 512 MB, excl. VAT
Outbound traffic	Bytes sent to visitors	Railway: $0.05 per GB; Render: $0.15 per GB over the included amount
Fixed fees	Workspace, seats or plan	Render Pro: $25 a month; Vercel Pro: $20 a month with $20 of usage credit
Flat plan	Nothing, up to the limits	Eurobase: €10 or €20 a month + VAT per workspace

Prices are from each provider's own page, checked on 9 and 10 November 2026.

What to check before you trust an estimate

Whether the subscription is a fee or a credit. Railway says its subscription goes toward your usage, so a $5 Hobby plan with $13 of usage costs $13, not $18. Render's $25 Pro fee sits on top of compute.
Whether idle time is billed. A service that holds memory around the clock pays for 730 hours whether or not anyone visits. A container that scales to zero, or a free instance that sleeps, pays only while it runs, but the first visitor after a pause waits.
What counts as included traffic. Render's Hobby workspace includes 5 GB of bandwidth, Pro 25 GB, then $0.15 per GB. Cloudflare doesn't charge for egress on Workers. Sliplane lists free egress under a fair use policy.
Which currency and whether VAT is in. Most US platforms price in dollars. Scalingo, Sliplane and Eurobase price in euros excluding VAT, so add your country's rate.
What the database really costs. On many stacks it's the largest single line. Check memory, storage and backups separately; see managed Postgres in Europe for the options.

Step 1. Write down your quantities

Pull a normal month from your current host's usage page, your logs or your analytics:

Number of services that must stay running: web, worker, cron.
Memory each one holds at rest and at peak.
Average CPU use, as a share of one vCPU.
Requests a month, and how many of them are static files.
Outbound gigabytes a month.
Database size and the memory it needs.
Build minutes and the number of people who need a seat.

Step 2. Price always-on compute

For resource-billed platforms, multiply what you hold by the hourly or monthly rate. On Railway, a service holding 0.5 GB of RAM all month is $5, and an average of 0.1 vCPU adds $2.

For fixed-size platforms, pick the smallest size that fits your peak memory. Render lists a 512 MB web service at $7 a month and a 2 GB one at $25. Scalingo lists 256 MB at €7.20, 512 MB at €14.40 and 1 GB at €28.80 a month, estimated on 30 days, VAT excluded.

On a server platform such as Sliplane, add up what all services need and choose a server big enough for the total. Its 1 vCPU, 1 GB server is €9 and 2 vCPU, 2 GB is €17.80, both without VAT.

Step 3. Price traffic and requests

Request-billed runtimes charge for what reaches your code. Cloudflare's own pricing page shows a project with 15 million requests a month where 80% are static files: static requests are free, the remaining 3 million fit inside the included allowance, and the bill is the $5 subscription.

Vercel's Hobby plan includes 1 million function invocations, 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer and 4 hours of Active CPU a month. On Pro, function use is billed from the $20 monthly credit, with Active CPU starting at $0.128 an hour and invocations at $0.60 per million, and CDN traffic falls under its Flat Rate CDN. Compare your step 1 numbers against each allowance before adding any overage.

Step 4. Add the database, storage and fixed fees

Price the database as its own service. Render Postgres starts at $6 a month for 256 MB and $19 for 1 GB of RAM. Scalingo's smallest Postgres is €7.20 a month excl. VAT for 512 MB and 10 GB. On Railway, a database is billed like any service: memory, CPU and $0.15 per GB a month of volume storage.

Then add workspace or seat fees, build minutes over the included amount and VAT.

Step 5. Price a bad month

Multiply traffic by five or ten and run steps 2 to 4 again. On a usage plan, that's your bill if a launch or a bot wave hits. On a fixed-size or flat plan, find which limit you'd reach first and what happens then. Flat or usage-based pricing explains how each platform behaves at its limit.

A worked example

One Node.js web service holding 512 MB with light CPU, one small Postgres, 30 GB of outbound traffic a month, one developer.

Platform	How it adds up	Monthly estimate
Render	Hobby $0 + web service $7 + Postgres 1 GB $19 + 25 GB over the included 5 GB at $0.15	About $30, plus database storage
Railway	Hobby $5 counts toward usage: service 0.5 GB $5 + 0.1 vCPU $2 + database 0.5 GB $5 + 1 GB volume $0.15 + 30 GB egress $1.50	About $14
Scalingo	512 MB container €14.40 + Postgres €7.20	€21.60 excl. VAT
Sliplane	One 1 vCPU, 1 GB server running the app and a Postgres container you look after, or €19 more for its smallest managed Postgres	€9 excl. VAT, or €28 with managed Postgres
Eurobase	Starter plan, app as a container, database from another provider	€10 + VAT, plus the database

The Railway line assumes the database stays near 0.5 GB of memory. Real usage moves, so treat it as a range, not a quote.

Where Eurobase fits in the estimate

Eurobase, a business registered in Warsaw, Poland, builds your app from Git and runs it on European infrastructure run by Scaleway, a French provider. Next.js, Astro and Nuxt apps go to V8 isolates. Node.js, Python, Go and other servers become containers, which stop when no traffic arrives and start again on the next request.

Steps 2 to 4 become a comparison instead of a sum: check your quantities against the plan limits. Starter includes 720 hours of container active time, 72 hours of container CPU, 648,000 GB-s of container memory, 30,000,000 ms of Workers CPU and 100 GiB of file transfer a month. That memory figure works out to about 0.25 GB held for a whole 30-day month.

Best for: teams that want the month's maximum to be known in advance.
Price: Free, then Starter at €10 and Pro at €20 a month + VAT for the whole workspace, and members cost nothing extra.
What it lacks: managed Postgres, MySQL or Redis, so the database is a separate line from another provider. No preview deployments or Dockerfile builds. It doesn't hold ISO 27001 or SOC 2 yet; both are in progress.

Nothing is billed by usage today. Anything past a limit is refused: apps on V8 isolates and Functions stop until the monthly reset, and containers and static sites go on serving.

When a plain server is cheaper

A virtual server is often the lowest number on paper. Hetzner lists cloud servers from €5.49 a month excl. VAT for a CPX02 in Helsinki, or €6.49 in Falkenstein or Nuremberg, though its cheapest plans showed as unavailable to order on 10 November 2026. Add the hours you'll spend on updates, backups and incidents before comparing it to a managed platform.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to host a small web app?

For one web service and a small database, expect roughly €10 to €30 a month on a managed platform, or less on a self-managed server. A static site or a frontend app with few dynamic requests can fit inside a free plan.

Is the database included in hosting prices?

Usually not. Render, Scalingo and Railway price the database as its own service, and Eurobase has no managed database. Budget it as a separate line.

How do I estimate bandwidth for a new app?

Multiply expected visits by pages per visit and by average page weight, then add API responses and downloads. A 1 MB page viewed 30,000 times a month is about 30 GB of outbound traffic.

Do hosting prices include VAT?

Often not. Scalingo, Sliplane and Eurobase show prices without VAT, and US platforms usually quote in dollars before tax. Add the rate that applies to your business.