Render Pricing 2026: Workspace Plans and Compute Costs

Render costs $0 on Hobby, $25/mo on Pro and $499/mo on Scale in 2026, and each fee is a flat workspace charge with compute billed on top. A paid web service starts at $7/mo for 0.5 CPU and 512 MB, and a paid Postgres database at $6/mo. Enterprise is custom. No plan charges per seat.

Every figure here was read on Render's pricing page and its free plan documentation on October 18, 2026. Our view: Pro is the right plan for almost every team that ships to production, because the flat fee buys unlimited seats, and Scale only pays for itself when compliance or SSO is a hard requirement. The product itself is covered in the Render review; this page is about the invoice.

Plan	Workspace fee	Seats	Bandwidth included	Best for
Hobby	$0	1	5 GB a month	Personal projects and prototypes, up to 25 services
Pro	$25/mo	Unlimited	25 GB a month	Teams running production apps
Scale	$499/mo	Unlimited	1 TB a month	Teams that need SAML SSO, SCIM, HIPAA or several workspaces
Enterprise	Custom	Unlimited	Custom	Contractual uptime SLAs and a dedicated account team

Toolradar data: Render is listed as an alternative to 47 other tools on Toolradar, the software directory we run, which puts it first among the 317 tools in its hosting and deployment ranking as of October 2026. That makes it the most cross-shopped host in the category; its record is Render on Toolradar.

How does Render billing work?

Render bills three separate things, and its FAQ names them: a flat workspace subscription, metered features such as bandwidth, and compute for each service. The workspace fee buys features and allowances, not capacity. A Pro workspace with no services runs nothing, and every web service, worker or database you add brings its own monthly price.

Compute is set per service and prorated to the second. Render's example is a paid web service switched off after 24 hours, which is billed for 24 hours only. Cron jobs and Workflows follow the same rule and bill only while they run. That proration is useful for preview environments and short experiments, but a service that stays up all month pays its full listed price whether it serves one request or a million.

One rule protects quiet workspaces. If a Pro or Scale workspace has no services, live or suspended, and no activity during a month, Render waives that month's subscription fee. A team that keeps a dormant workspace for a client pays nothing for it, as long as nothing in it is running or suspended.

What do Render's compute sizes cost?

Each service picks an instance size, and the price is fixed for that size. These are the general-purpose sizes for web services, private services and background workers, as listed on the pricing page:

Instance	CPU	RAM	Price
Free	Less than 1	512 MB	$0, with limits
0.5c-512mb	0.5	512 MB	$7/mo
1c-2g	1	2 GB	$25/mo
2c-4g	2	4 GB	$85/mo
2c-8g	2	8 GB	$135/mo
4c-8g	4	8 GB	$175/mo
4c-16g	4	16 GB	$225/mo
8c-32g	8	32 GB	$450/mo
12c-96g	12	96 GB	$1,500/mo

The jump from the smallest paid size to the next one is large. Going from 0.5 CPU to 1 CPU more than triples the price, and 2 CPU with 4 GB costs 3.4 times the 1 CPU size. An app that outgrows its instance by a little pays for the whole next step, which is the opposite of a per-second meter like Railway's. If your load is spiky, horizontal autoscaling on Pro and above adds instances of the same size instead of forcing a bigger one.

Persistent disks for these services cost $0.25 per GB per month on every plan. Cron jobs are priced per minute of runtime, from $0.00016 a minute on the smallest size, so a 5-minute job every hour comes to about $0.58 a month. Workflows, Render's durable task runner, start at $0.20 per active CPU hour plus $0.05 per active GB hour.

Render Postgres and Key Value pricing

Datastores have their own size ladders. Paid Postgres starts at $6/mo for 256 MB of RAM, with 1 GB of SSD storage included and expandable storage at $0.30 per GB. Point-in-time recovery keeps 3 days on Hobby and 7 days on Pro, Scale and Enterprise.

Datastore size	CPU	RAM	Connections	Price
Postgres basic-256mb	Less than 1	256 MB	100	$6/mo
Postgres basic-1gb	Less than 1	1 GB	100	$19/mo
Postgres 1c-2g	1	2 GB	100	$40/mo
Postgres 1c-4g	1	4 GB	100	$55/mo
Postgres 2c-8g	2	8 GB	200	$100/mo
Postgres 4c-16g	4	16 GB	400	$200/mo
Key Value 256mb	Standard	256 MB	200	$10/mo
Key Value 1g	Standard	1 GB	250	$20/mo
Key Value 5g	Standard	5 GB	5,000	$100/mo

The top of the Postgres ladder reaches 128 CPU and 1,024 GB of RAM at $11,000 a month, so Render can carry a large database without a move to a cloud provider. The connection counts matter more than the RAM for many web apps: every size up to 4 GB caps you at 100 connections, so an app with many workers needs a pooler before it needs a bigger instance.

Key Value is Render's Redis-compatible store. Paid sizes persist to disk; the free one is in-memory only, so its data is lost on a restart and again when you upgrade it to a paid plan.

What is free on Render?

Hobby has no workspace fee, and three service types have free instances: web services, Postgres and Key Value. Static sites are always free to deploy. They are built for trying the platform rather than hosting a product, and the free plan documentation spells out where each one stops.

• A free web service gets 750 instance hours per calendar month and spins down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic. Waking it takes about one minute, so the first visitor after a quiet spell waits.
• A free Postgres database has 1 GB of storage and expires 30 days after creation, with a 14-day grace period before deletion. It has no backups, and each workspace gets one.
• Free web services cannot use persistent disks, scaling or SSH, and outbound SMTP ports are blocked, so a free app cannot send mail directly.

Free usage still counts against the workspace's bandwidth and build-minute allowances. The free database expiry is the trap most people hit: a side project left on free Postgres loses its data unless you upgrade within the grace window. The cloud free tiers comparison sets that limit next to other hosts' free plans.

Overages and add-ons outside the instance price

The instance price is not the whole bill. These charges sit on top, and the allowance differs by plan:

Charge	Hobby	Pro	Scale
Bandwidth beyond allowance	$0.15 per GB after 5 GB	$0.15 per GB after 25 GB	$0.15 per GB after 1 TB
Build pipeline minutes	500 included, then $5 per 1K	1K included, then $5 per 1K	5K included, then $5 per 1K
Custom domains	2 included, then $0.25 each a month	15 included	25 included
Log retention	7 days	14 days	30 days
Dedicated IPs	Not offered	$100/mo per IP set	$100/mo per IP set
AWS private links	Not offered	$30/mo for up to 3	$30/mo for up to 3

Bandwidth is the line most likely to surprise a growing app. At $0.15 per GB, 100 GB of egress past the Pro allowance adds $15 a month, and a media-heavy app that serves 1 TB on Pro pays about $146 in overage. That is the point where Scale's 1 TB allowance starts to offset part of its fee, though not all of it.

Two more costs apply to specific teams. The Performance build pipeline, available from Pro, runs builds on larger machines at five times the standard pipeline's per-minute rate. And HIPAA-enabled workspaces on Scale and Enterprise pay a 20% compute premium, on top of the Scale fee, so a regulated workload costs more than the instance table shows.

Three Render bills, priced line by line

We priced three common setups at Render's list prices, assuming every service runs the whole month. The service mix and the traffic are our inputs; every rate is Render's.

Line item	Side project (Hobby)	Small team app (Pro)	Growing product (Scale)
Workspace fee	$0	$25.00	$499.00
Web services	One 0.5c-512mb, $7.00	One 1c-2g, $25.00	Two 2c-4g, $170.00
Background worker	None	One 0.5c-512mb, $7.00	None
Postgres	basic-256mb, $6.00	1c-4g, $55.00	4c-16g, $200.00
Postgres storage	Included	10 GB, $2.70	50 GB, $14.70
Key Value	None	256mb, $10.00	1g, $20.00
Bandwidth	Within allowance	50 GB, $3.75	500 GB, included
Monthly total	$13.00	$128.45	$903.70

The workspace fee is a small share of a team bill and a large share of a Scale bill. On the Pro setup, the workspace fee is about 19% of the month; on the Scale setup, the fee is about 55%. For a Pro team of ten people, the flat fee works out to $2.50 a head, which is why the lack of per-seat pricing matters more than the headline figure.

The side project shows the floor for an always-on app with a database that does not expire. Over a year the small team setup comes to $1,541.40, and the jump from there to Scale is mostly the workspace fee, not the compute. A team that does not need SSO, SCIM or HIPAA gets the same instance prices on Pro.

How Render compares with Railway and Heroku

For the side project, Render and Heroku land within a dollar of each other. Heroku sells a Basic dyno with 0.5 GB at $7 a month and Essential-0 Postgres with 1 GB at $5, so the same small app costs $12 there against $13 on Render. Render's database has a dedicated instance with 100 connections; Heroku's Essential tier runs on shared RAM.

Railway bills differently: a $5 Hobby or $20 Pro minimum that counts as usage, then about $10 per GB of RAM and $20 per vCPU a month, metered by the second. A light app that idles most of the day usually costs less there, and an app that runs its CPU hard all month costs less on Render's fixed sizes. The break-even math for one web service and a database is in Railway vs Render, and Railway's own plans are in Railway pricing.

If neither shape fits, the wider field is in Heroku alternatives, serverless platforms and the Postgres hosting roundup, and a frontend-first team should read Vercel pricing. Moving an existing app is covered step by step in how to migrate from Heroku. Directory records: Railway and Heroku on Toolradar.

Dupple data: Devshot reaches 30,000+ developers with a 32% open rate, per the audience file dated November 1, 2026. Hosting bills are a regular topic in the Devshot brief.

Which Render plan should you pick?

Stay on Hobby while one person owns the project and the services fit in 25. Move to Pro the day a second person needs access, a preview environment needs the whole stack, or you want autoscaling, because the fee is flat and the instance prices do not change. Pick Scale only for SAML SSO, SCIM, HIPAA, inbound IP rules or several workspaces; for an uptime SLA, Render points you to Enterprise.

Before you upgrade, look at the instance sizes rather than the plan. Most Render bills grow because a service steps up a size or a database outgrows its connections, and those steps cost the same on every plan. Render also advertises up to $10K in migration credits for teams moving production infrastructure, and up to $100K in credits for VC-funded startups, which can cover months of a Pro bill.

How we checked these prices

Louis Corneloup, founder of Dupple and Toolradar, wrote this page from Render's pricing page and its free plan documentation, both read on October 18, 2026, with the Railway and Heroku figures read on their pricing pages linked above the same day. The service mix, storage and traffic in the scenarios are our inputs; every rate is the vendor's. Devshot runs no test lab, so nothing here is a benchmark. Editorial rules are on the Devshot about page.

FAQ

How much does Render cost in 2026?

Render's Hobby workspace is free, Pro is $25 a month and Scale is $499 a month, each plus compute, and Enterprise is custom. Compute starts at $7 a month for a 0.5 CPU, 512 MB web service and $6 a month for the smallest paid Postgres. Prices were read on Render's pricing page on October 18, 2026.

Does Render charge per user?

No. Hobby includes one team seat, and Pro, Scale and Enterprise include unlimited seats for their flat workspace fee. A ten-person team on Pro pays the same workspace fee as a two-person team, and only the compute it runs changes the bill.

Is Render free?

Partly. Hobby has no fee, static sites are free, and free instances exist for web services, Postgres and Key Value. A free web service sleeps after 15 minutes without traffic and takes about a minute to wake, and free Postgres expires 30 days after creation, so a real app needs at least a paid web instance and database.

What happens when a free Render database expires?

It stops working 30 days after creation, and Render deletes it after a further 14-day grace period unless you upgrade it to a paid instance. Free Postgres also has no backups, so export anything you need before the deadline or move it to the smallest paid size.

Is Render Pro worth it over Hobby?

Yes for any team, because Hobby allows a single seat. Pro adds unlimited seats and services, five times Hobby's bandwidth allowance, full-stack previews, autoscaling and 14-day logs for a flat fee. A solo developer with a few services and light traffic can stay on Hobby and pay compute only.

Is Render cheaper than Railway or Heroku?

It depends on how hard the app runs. For a small always-on app with Postgres, Render came to $13 a month in our scenario against $12 on Heroku. Railway meters CPU and RAM by the second, so it usually wins for apps that idle and loses for apps that run their CPU all month, while Render's fixed sizes stay at their listed price under load.

Cite this: Devshot, "Render Pricing 2026: Workspace Plans and Compute Costs", October 2026.

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