Our take
Pick Northflank if app teams who will stay on Sandbox at $0 (2 services, 2 jobs, 1 database, $20 of Cloud resources, no seat fee) while they ship a first project canvas, then move to Pay as you go when they need unlimited services and horizontal scale — billed from $0.01667/vCPU-hour on Northflank Cloud. Pick Render if teams who will stay on Hobby at $0 / month + the free 512 MB web service while they deploy a first
usage-metered deploy desk
Best for
Northflank Workloads you start at $0
Render Web services and a Postgres you start at $0
Free plan
Northflank $0 · no card. 2 services, 2 jobs, 1 database. Up to $20/month of resources on Northflank Cloud. 1 BYOC cluster, up to 12 vCPU / 48 GB (your cloud still bills that infra). Always on, no sleeping. 2 projects. Best-effort support
Render $0 · / month + compute. Deploy up to 25 services. 5 GB bandwidth. Single-service previews
Lowest paid
Northflank Printed compute plans $12
Render Pro $25
Next step up
Northflank
Render Scale $499
Runs where
Northflank Local; you host it
Render Hosted
Watch out
Northflank Sandbox is 2 services, 2 jobs, 1 addon, and $20 of Cloud resources
Render Hobby $0 is the workspace tile, not unlimited RAM
Last checked
Northflank 2026-10-23 · northflank.com/pricing
Render 2026-10-23 · render.com/pricing
app teams who will stay on Sandbox at $0 (2 services, 2 jobs, 1 database, $20 of Cloud resources, no seat fee) while they ship a first project canvas, then move to Pay as you go when they need unlimited services and horizontal scale — billed from $0.01667/vCPU-hour on Northflank Cloud.
Read the Northflank pageteams who will stay on Hobby at $0 / month + the free 512 MB web service while they deploy a first project, then buy Pro at $25 / month when they need unlimited seats and full-stack previews.
Read the Render page