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⚠︎ PaaS hidden costs: sleep, egress and per-seat
Sleep: a sleeping free tier means ~1 min load time for the first visitor — unusable in production. Egress: Vercel's $0.15/GB is 7× Fly's price; a media site pays more for this than for compute. Per-seat: Railway Pro and Vercel Pro charge $20/mo for EVERY team member. Database: cheapest app + cheapest Postgres doubles the price (Heroku $7+$5). For heavier workloads a VPS is 2–5× cheaper — you pay with admin time.
How to choose?
Hobby project: Koyeb ($1.61/mo always-on) or Fly.io (~$2) — small but real servers. EU data matters: Scalingo (€7.20, unlimited traffic, no seat fees) or Clever Cloud (€4.50) — both French. Classic DX: Heroku and Render ($7) are the most mature. Frontend + functions: Vercel/Netlify — but they're a different product category (no long-running processes) and Netlify's new credit model gutted the free tier.