Hosting platforms

Where to deploy an MVP without overpaying or over-engineering — Vercel, S3+CloudFront, Cloudflare, Fly, Render, and the ones to avoid.

Hosting is the first decision where you can quietly waste $50/month for the next two years. The good news: for almost every MVP, the right answer is one of three platforms. The bad news: the wrong answer (Kubernetes, Amplify, a hand-rolled VPS) feels grown-up and is anything but.

This page walks the eight hosts you'll actually consider, what each is genuinely good at, and where it falls down.

Vercel

Vercel is the default home for anything built on Next.js, and an extremely good home for Astro, Remix, SvelteKit, and Nuxt. The free Hobby tier covers 100 GB of bandwidth, unlimited static deploys, and serverless functions with reasonable execution limits — enough for most pre-revenue MVPs to live there indefinitely as long as the project stays non-commercial.

The minute you put a paid product on it, you're on Pro at $20/seat/month, plus usage. That's fine for a real business. It is not fine for ten side projects sharing one account.

Where Vercel shines: instant git push deploys, perfect Next.js feature parity (ISR, middleware, image optimization, server actions), preview URLs per pull request that agents love. Where it stings: bandwidth overages get expensive fast, and image optimization billed per source-image can surprise you on a viral day.

npm i -g vercel
vercel link
vercel --prod

Netlify

Netlify is the older sibling that pioneered "git push to deploy." It still works, the free tier still gives you 100 GB bandwidth and 300 build minutes, and the deploy UX is excellent for static sites and Jamstack frameworks. Netlify Functions exist but feel like an afterthought next to Vercel's tighter Next.js integration.

Pick Netlify if you've already used it, like the dashboard, or want a one-click form-handling and identity layer without setting up a backend. Skip it if you're on Next.js — you'll fight the framework.

Cloudflare Pages

The most generous free tier in the business: unlimited bandwidth, unlimited requests, 500 builds per month, free SSL, free DDoS protection. If your site is static or uses Cloudflare Workers for compute, Pages is borderline unbeatable on cost.

The catch is the runtime. Workers run on V8 isolates, not Node.js, so any library that touches a Node API needs the nodejs_compat flag and may still misbehave. For Next.js you'll want @cloudflare/next-on-pages, which works but lags upstream.

Pick Cloudflare Pages for: static sites at scale, anything Hono- or Worker-native, projects where bandwidth is the dominant cost.

AWS S3 + CloudFront

This is what runs vibecodersguidetomvp.help. Total monthly cost: about $0.50, occasionally $0.70 if a post gets hugged.

The setup is more involved than Vercel — you'll touch S3, CloudFront, ACM (for SSL), and Route 53 (for DNS) — but each piece is rock-solid and the pricing is genuinely pennies. CloudFront's free tier covers 1 TB of egress per month for the first 12 months, then $0.085/GB for North America. S3 storage is $0.023/GB. There are no per-build minutes, no per-deploy fees, no surprise bills.

We have a full walkthrough in the cheapest-static-site post and a detailed deploy recipe in s3-cloudfront-acm-route53.

Pick this for: static sites you intend to keep alive cheaply for years, sites that would otherwise blow Vercel's bandwidth budget, anyone who wants the bill to be a rounding error. Skip it if you need server-side rendering, streaming, or a runtime — at that point either run Lambda alongside it (more setup) or use a host with built-in SSR.

Fly.io

Fly runs your Docker container in micro-VMs in any of ~35 regions, and gives you persistent volumes, machines that scale to zero, and a free tier that covers small toys. It's the right answer when you need a long-running server process — a websocket service, a Python ML endpoint, a Phoenix app — and you want it close to users without an EKS cluster.

Pricing is usage-based: shared-CPU 1x with 256 MB starts around $1.94/month if always on, less if it sleeps. Postgres is offered separately and is fine for hobby projects.

Pick Fly for: stateful servers, multi-region read replicas, anything Docker-shaped. Skip it if your app is a static site (way overkill) or if you're not comfortable reading a fly.toml.

Railway

Railway is the most "just works" host for full-stack apps with a database. Connect a GitHub repo, click deploy, get a Postgres next to it. Pricing starts at $5/month for the Hobby plan plus usage; the old "free trial" credits are gone.

Where it wins: developer experience for a Node + Postgres + Redis stack is uniquely smooth, and the dashboard is the prettiest in this list. Where it loses: cost creeps as you add services — three small workers and a Postgres can hit $20-30/month before you've shipped anything.

Pick Railway for: prototypes that need a real database, internal tools, anything where you want one bill and zero infra knowledge.

Render

Render is Heroku reborn — the same git-push-to-PaaS model, with managed Postgres and Redis bolted on. Free tier exists for static sites and trial web services (which spin down after 15 minutes idle). Paid web services start at $7/month for 0.5 CPU / 512 MB.

Render's pitch is stability and predictable bills. It's a fine, slightly boring choice. We'd reach for Fly first for containers and Vercel first for Next.js, but Render is the safest "I'll be here in 5 years" pick of the PaaS pack.

Heroku

Heroku invented this category, then Salesforce killed the free tier in 2022, then partially reintroduced low-cost dyne plans starting at $5/month. The platform still works, the buildpacks still work, the Postgres add-on is still excellent — but the rest of the world has caught up and Heroku is no longer cheaper or easier than the alternatives.

Pick Heroku only if: you have an existing Heroku app, your team already knows it, or you're nostalgic. Otherwise, Fly or Railway are doing what Heroku used to do, better.

Comparison

Anti-patterns

A few things to avoid for an MVP, no matter how seriously the LinkedIn influencers take them:

• Kubernetes. Unless you're an SRE by trade, you'll spend more time on the cluster than the product. EKS alone is $73/month before you run a single pod.
• AWS Amplify. Amplify is what AWS built when it noticed Vercel was eating its lunch. It's neither as polished as Vercel nor as cheap as raw S3+CloudFront. Skip it.
• Hand-rolled VPS (DigitalOcean droplet, Hetzner, Linode) running Nginx + PM2 + Let's Encrypt + a deploy script you wrote on a Sunday. This is great if you're an engineer who enjoys it. Otherwise you're one apt-upgrade away from a broken site at midnight.
• Vercel for static-only sites that will outgrow free tier. If your blog or docs site might get featured somewhere, Vercel's bandwidth pricing can sting. S3+CloudFront or Cloudflare Pages is the safer long-term home.

Our recommendation

• Next.js MVP, low traffic: Vercel free Hobby. Ship today, worry about migration if and when you hit the limit. Most projects never do.
• Next.js MVP, commercial: Vercel Pro at $20/month. The DX premium is worth it if the project earns even a little.
• Static site or docs: AWS S3 + CloudFront. About $0.50/month, scales to anything, never surprises you. This site is the proof.
• Full-stack with a database: Railway for fastest start, Fly for cheapest scale.
• Anything stateful or Dockerized: Fly.io.
• You haven't picked a framework yet: start with Next.js on Vercel and revisit in 90 days.

Don't optimize hosting before you have users. The difference between $0 and $20/month doesn't matter; the difference between shipping in a week and shipping in two months does.

Related reading

• Cheapest static site on AWS: S3 + CloudFront
• Deploying with S3, CloudFront, ACM, and Route 53
• Domains & DNS
• Analytics & monitoring
• Dev tools & agents
• Skills index