What hosting a side project actually costs in 2026

Every hosting provider advertises a number, and almost none of those numbers is what your side project will cost. Free tiers hide restrictions, monthly fees hide idle time, and “pay as you go” hides the question of what you actually go through.

So here’s the honest version. One table, prices checked in September 2026, followed by the math that actually matters: what it costs to keep alive a thing that gets twenty visits a day.

The menu, verified

The number that matters is idle time

Here’s the thing nobody’s pricing page says out loud: a side project is asleep almost all the time. A tracker your padel group opens in the evening, a portfolio that gets a burst when you share it, a dashboard your team checks twice a day — generously, that’s one or two active hours per day.

A monthly fee bills all 720 hours. Usage pricing bills the 40 you used:

• 40 active hours × $0.01 = $0.40 of compute
• 1 GB of data × $0.40 = $0.40 of storage
• The other 680 hours: $0. The app sleeps and wakes on the next visit.

Total: about eighty cents a month, for an app with a real backend, a database file, TLS and login. That’s not a promotional rate — it’s just what happens when nobody pays for idle.

What the monthly fee actually buys

To be fair to the fee-chargers: you’re not paying $5–7 for nothing. Railway and Render have polished dashboards, mature ecosystems and years of production mileage. A VPS gives you total control and unbeatable specs per dollar — if the sysadmin work is fun for you, Hetzner is genuinely hard to argue with. And once your project is a busy production app — hundreds of active hours a month — the flat fee amortizes fine and the sticker prices converge; always-on costs about $7/month on Alora too.

The gap is specifically the long tail: the five projects you’ve built that mostly sleep. On a per-service fee, five sleepy apps cost $25–35/month forever. On usage pricing they cost a few dollars, total.

The line items that ambush you later

• The second person. Per-seat pricing means “can my cofounder see the dashboard?” has a price tag. On Alora, sharing an app by email (with roles) is free — you’re billed for compute, not for people.
• The database. On most platforms a managed database is its own monthly line. A side project usually just needs a SQLite file that survives deploys — which is what Alora’s $0.40/GB persistent storage is.
• Your hours. The VPS is $5 plus every Saturday afternoon a certbot renewal fails. Price your time at anything above zero and the math moves.
• The upgrade cliff. The free tier that can’t take money (Vercel Hobby) or falls asleep on your visitors (Render free) has a hidden cost: the migration you’ll do later, at the worst possible time.

The boring conclusion

There’s no universally right answer, but there’s a right question: how many hours a month is this thing actually awake? Under ~50, usage pricing wins by an order of magnitude. Over ~700 (always-on), everything costs roughly the same $5–10 and you should pick on features. In between, do the multiplication — it takes a minute and it’s your answer.

Alora starts you with $0.50 of free credit, which at these rates covers your first weeks entirely. And because your agent does the deploying, trying it costs one sentence.

Prices checked September 2026 against each provider’s public pricing page. If one drifted, tell us at hola@alora.build and we’ll fix it — this post only works if it’s true.