Hello, I’m having an app developed by a company. I need somewhere to host the app and fly.io came highly recommended. What I’m trying to figure out is there is a, I think, $5 a month plan and a free plan and I’m not sure which way I should go so I was hoping for some guidance. Being that I’m in the beginning stages, I would like to keep this small until my traffic grows larger.
Any help you can provide on this would be very useful.
Hi there,
Where did you see the $5/month plan?
These days we don’t really have plans. All resource usage is metered and billed at the end of the month at the rates detailed here: https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/. All accounts are on this “pay-as-you-go” modality. There are a couple of add-ons that do have a monthly cost but they’re optional: Support add-ons (from $29/month) and the Compliance add-on ($99/month).
What I’d recommend is for you to create a Fly.io account, ask your developer to create a Fly.io account, invite them to your Fly.io organization (either your personal one or, recommended, a second organization only for your project) and ask them to deploy the app in that organization that you share with them, not in their own personal organization. This allows them to work on the app in an organization that’s under your control.
Cheers!
This may merely be a misremembering. On a personal organisation, Fly will, or at least used to, waive bills that are under $5 for the month.
However, either way, assuming your app works on a small machine, your outlay should be pretty low. Just impress on your development agency the importance of sticking to technical choices that are cheap; it’s unfortunately easy to build an app that is expensive to run!
Just as an example of how costs can spiral, see this calculator. Some basic compute comes in at $4/month, but then the smallest possible managed database costs $38/month!
I suggest the solution to this is to shop around for a db provider. Here’s a MySQL database for $5/month; as long as you roughly match the region of your app with the region of your db, your app performance should be fine.
Of course, you can always post a systems diagram of your app here, and maybe people will weigh in with advice 