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 Spacelift if platform teams who will stay on Free at $0 (2 users, 1 public worker, no card) while they open
usage-metered deploy desk
hosted IaC-run desk
Best for
Northflank Workloads you start at $0
Spacelift Terraform / OpenTofu / Ansible runs 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
Spacelift $0 · no card, no time limit. 2 users. 1 public worker. IaC + VCS on the public pool
Lowest paid
Northflank Printed compute plans $12
Spacelift Not published by the vendor
Runs where
Northflank Local; you host it
Spacelift Hosted
Watch out
Northflank Sandbox is 2 services, 2 jobs, 1 addon, and $20 of Cloud resources
Spacelift Free is 2 users and 1 shared public worker
Last checked
Northflank 2026-10-23 · northflank.com/pricing
Spacelift 2026-10-23 · spacelift.io/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 pageplatform teams who will stay on Free at $0 (2 users, 1 public worker, no card) while they open a first Stacks list, then request a Starter+ quote when they need a private worker and unlimited users.
Read the Spacelift page