Fly.io is a global hardware-virtualized cloud that runs any Dockerfile as a Firecracker micro-VM in 35+ regions. Great for real-time, edge-heavy and agent workloads — but no more free tier and complex pay-as-you-go billing.
Fly.io is a global hardware-virtualized public cloud that runs your containers as Firecracker micro-VMs in 35+ regions, with instant-boot Fly Machines for apps and Sprites for AI agent sandboxes. We rate it 75/100 — the cleanest global deploy experience in the PaaS space and a natural home for real-time, edge-heavy, or agent-driven workloads, but the complex resource-based pricing, lack of billing alerts and the end of the original free tier mean it is no longer the cheap Heroku replacement it used to be.
Fly.io is a public cloud built by Kurt Mackey, Thomas Ptacek and the team at Superfly, Inc., which has been around since and pivoted to its current "hardware-virtualized containers" shape in 2020. You push a Dockerfile (or let fly launch generate one from a Rails, Django, Phoenix, Laravel or Next.js app) and Fly boots it as a Firecracker VM on bare-metal servers across 35+ regions — from Amsterdam and Ashburn to Sydney, Johannesburg and São Paulo — with sub-100ms latency for most of the world.
The pitch is specific. Vercel, Railway and Render are great at shipping a single-region web app; AWS and GCP hand you everything but ask you to become a platform engineer. Fly.io sits in the middle: real multi-region by default, persistent volumes and private networking at every POP, first-class Postgres and SQLite (LiteFS), and a CLI-first workflow that DevOps teams actually enjoy. flyctl, the open-source CLI, has 1,600+ stars on GitHub, and LiteFS, the replicated SQLite filesystem, has 4,700+. Notable customers include Supabase, Builder.io, Mercor, Cogram, Reflex and Imbue.
fly deploy really does run everywhere.The Hacker News thread on the Sprites launch was the most positive Fly has had in years — Simon Willison called Sprites "the cleanest dev-sandbox plus API-sandbox pairing I've seen," and Thomas Ptacek confirmed on-thread that a local open-source version is coming. On Dept Agency's long-form Fly.io review, the verdict was "genuinely the Heroku successor for 2020s-scale apps."
The complaints are consistent and have gotten louder. On the community forum's "Free tier is dead?" thread and across r/webdev and r/reactjs, three issues come up over and over: (1) billing is unpredictable — a single traffic spike can multiply your invoice overnight because CPU, RAM, volumes, egress, dedicated IPs and inter-region private networking are all metered separately; (2) Fly.io still does not ship billing alerts; (3) the dashboard is minimal and most day-to-day work happens through flyctl. Kurt Mackey has acknowledged on Hacker News that the main CLI surface is "complex" and that the Sprite CLI is an attempt to fix that for new users.
Fly.io runs entirely on pay-as-you-go resource pricing in 2026 — there is no free tier any more. New accounts get a minimal trial (roughly 2 VM hours or 7 days) before a credit card is required. All prices below are for the US/EU "Amsterdam" tier:
| Resource | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| shared-cpu-1x (256MB) | ~$2.02 / month | Smallest always-on machine |
| shared-cpu-4x (4GB) | ~$23.66 / month | Typical small production app |
| performance-2x (8GB) | ~$85.17 / month | Production web tier |
| performance-16x (128GB) | ~$1,013.80 / month | Large workloads |
| Volumes | $0.15 / GB / month | Snapshots $0.08/GB, first 10GB free |
| Egress (NA/EU) | $0.02 / GB | $0.04 APAC, $0.12 Africa/India |
| Dedicated IPv4 | $2 / month | Per app |
| Fly Kubernetes | $75 / month / cluster | Plus compute and volumes |
| Machine Reservations | 40% off | $36–$14,400 / year prepay |
| Support | $29–$2,500 / month | Standard → Enterprise |
Best for: teams shipping genuinely global apps where latency matters — real-time collaboration tools, WebSocket-heavy backends, multiplayer games, AI inference proxies, and anything that benefits from having the whole stack (compute plus volumes plus Postgres plus SQLite replica) close to users. Notable adopters include Supabase, Builder.io and Mercor, and Sprites is an obvious fit for anyone building coding agents.
Not ideal for: hobby projects and bootstrapped indie SaaS that need a true $0 tier — Railway, Render or a $5 Hetzner VPS will be cheaper and simpler. Also not the best pick for mostly-static frontend apps (Vercel or Netlify are closer to the metal for that) or teams that prefer a polished web dashboard over a CLI.
Pros:
fly deploy — not a marketing gimmick; your machines really do boot in 35 cities.Cons:
fly.toml.For Heroku-style simplicity on a single region, Railway and Render are faster to get started and still have real free tiers. For Next.js and front-end-heavy apps, Vercel sits closer to the metal. If you want self-hostable on your own VPS, Coolify or CapRover give you Fly-style deploys for the price of a $5 box. For larger enterprise workloads, Northflank and AWS Fargate cover similar ground with a flatter per-hour cost model.
If your app needs to be within 100ms of users in Tokyo, Johannesburg and São Paulo at the same time — and you'd rather write a Dockerfile than a VPC CloudFormation template — Fly.io is still the easiest way to ship it in 2026. The Sprites launch also makes it the most interesting cloud for teams building with coding agents. We rate it 75/100: the product is very good, but the complex pay-as-you-go pricing and the death of the free tier put it firmly in "production workload" territory rather than "weekend project."
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