Best app hosting for side projects

Combined ranking

1. 1
   Railway—14 pts

   GPT #2Claude #1Gemini #1

   The best developer experience in the space — deploy from a repo in minutes, usage-based pricing that scales to zero-ish costs for tiny projects, built-in Postgres/Redis/volumes, and no arbitrary limits on background workers or cron jobs, making it the default "just works" host for full-stack side projects

   To stay #1 Restore a genuinely free tier (the $5 trial credit runs out fast), since indie hackers start at $0 and its absence pushes first projects to competitors

2. 2
   Render—11 pts

   GPT #1Claude #4Gemini #2

   Best overall indie balance: simple Git deploys, broad full-stack support, managed Postgres/Redis, workers, cron jobs, private networking, sane defaults, and less platform lock-in than frontend-first hosts

   To rank higher Make cold starts and free/low-tier performance consistently faster

3. 3
   Vercelincumbent—8 pts

   GPT #3Claude #3Gemini #4

   Best-in-class for Next.js, previews, edge delivery, frontend performance, DX, analytics, and AI/web app workflows; unbeatable for many React-heavy products

   To rank higher Make backend hosting and usage-based billing feel less expensive and surprising

4. 4
   Fly.io—6 pts

   GPT #5Claude #2Gemini #5

   Runs real Docker containers close to users across 30+ regions, supports anything (websockets, background jobs, embedded SQLite via LiteFS), scale-to-zero machines keep hobby costs near pennies, and the CLI-first workflow is beloved by indie hackers

   To rank higher Smooth out reliability and support rough edges — intermittent platform incidents and community-only support at low tiers erode trust for solo devs with no ops backup

5. 5
   CCloudflare Pages—3 pts

   GPT —Claude —Gemini #3

   Unmatched free tier with unlimited bandwidth, global low-latency edge network, and seamless CDN integration.

   To rank higher Simplify full-stack local emulation and wrangler database configurations.

6. 6
   Cloudflare Workersincumbent—2 pts

   GPT #4Claude —Gemini —

   Extremely fast global edge runtime, generous pricing, strong primitives like KV/R2/D1/Queues, excellent scale-to-zero economics, and great for APIs and lightweight apps

   To rank higher Make full-stack app deployment feel as simple and flexible as traditional container hosting

7. 7
   HHetzner + Coolify—1 pts

   GPT —Claude #5Gemini —

   Unmatched price-to-performance — a €5/month VPS runs a dozen side projects, and self-hosted PaaS layers like Coolify give Heroku-style deploys on hardware you control, the favored setup of cost-conscious indie hackers in 2026

   To rank higher Offer a managed PaaS layer or first-party deploy experience, since requiring server admin skills (and lacking US-region breadth until recently) keeps beginners away

By model

Tracked by ModelsAgree · rank 1 = 5 pts … rank 5 = 1 pt · re-polled continuously