Billing for small applications

Questions / Help
1

Hello everyone. I know this has been asked before but there may have been policy changes so i wanted to get an updated answer.

Im running a small app for a discord bot with 256MB memory machine. Im aware that there are is no free plan but there is Pay as you Go, and from what i understand, charges under $5 are ignored.

  1. Does this still apply in 2025? If anyone has experience with this and can verify, that would be helpful. (note that if you have legacy hobby plan, everything is free still, but im asking about new accounts)
  2. is it that billing under $5 a month is ignored, or overall $5 of credit?
  3. I have 1-shared cpu 256MB which is apparently $1.94/mo. It should be okay to add another machine like this without violating $5/mo right..

Thanks in advance.

2

CleanShot 2025-04-02 at 10.47.59@2x
CleanShot 2025-04-02 at 10.47.59@2x1784×892 82.6 KB

It seems so… But I’d love this to be a bit more explicit it the docs.

3

Not really. I don’t speak for Fly.io at all, but you alluded to the fundamental problem yourself: you’re thinking of this as an implicit free tier, one that you can predict the exact details of down to $1 granularity, and that doesn’t exist.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the rule was quietly changed in early 2026 (the second anniversary of the closing of the real free tier). It’s much more common for US companies to gradually accumulate small charges, month to month, until the uncollected total exceeds $5.

The right approach is to instead be prepared to be asked, without warning, to pay $1.94 next month in your present configuration. And be pleasantly surprised (anew) each invoice where you see that once again it has actually been waived, :dove:…

That’s my own 2¢, as a fellow user.

1 Like
4

hey j4n. Thank you for the concise example. Your account is made after the free plan was removed, correct?

5

Yeah, im not really concerned if i end up do getting charged. I just asked on the forums to get some clarifications about a feature that is not well described, and asking around if others with a setup like mine are benefiting. It may not be a long term solution, but at least i can monitor the accumulated charges in the billing dashboard.

(To be fair.. im probably not going to host the app for more than 3 months, so i might not run into your problem)

6

I signed up two months ago, so yes. But @mayailurus is absolutely right here. This needs to be way clearer. I’m not a fan of this implicit free tier. I didn’t even know it exists up until this morning.

7

Its more of an additional feature rather than a plan tier, yeah.

Thanks for the screenshot confirmation.

8

I like @mayailurus’s thinking. Unless someone playing with Fly is so hard-up that they will be put into dire straits by being charged a few dollars a month, they could just relax. I fear that folks unhappy about trivial platform spend won’t think twice about frequently purchasing a cafe coffee that costs five times as much as a good one made at home.

I think I have three running machines and two stopped ones, and I’ve always flown under the 5$ radar. I would quite like to give Fly some money at some point, even if my business makes no money. It is a nice platform to play with :trophy:

9

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