- Price
- Web services from $7/month (Starter, 512 MB)
- Free plan
- Yes
- Setup
- A little code
- Up and running
- About 30 minutes for a web service with Postgres.
What Render is for
If your app has a traditional back end (Django, Rails, Express), it needs a server that stays on. Render runs that server from your GitHub repository, plus the database, background workers and scheduled tasks. Each piece has a fixed monthly price, so the bill is easy to predict.
How it plugs into your product
- 1Sign up with GitHub and create a Web Service from the repository.
- 2Create a Postgres database and paste its address into the service's environment variables.
- 3Choose the instance: Free to test, Starter ($7) or higher for real customers.
- 4Connect your domain; every push to the branch publishes a new version.
Does it fit your idea?
It fits if
- A SaaS in Django, Rails or Express that wants a fixed $7 server instead of a usage bill.
- A product that needs an API, a background worker and a daily scheduled task in one place.
- A demo or prototype where waiting a minute for the first page to load is fine.
Look elsewhere if
- You plan to run a paid product on the free tier, which sleeps and loses its database.
- Your users are in South America or Australia and need the lowest latency, since Render's regions are only in the US, Frankfurt and Singapore.
- Your app serves lots of files or video, since bandwidth over the plan costs $0.15 per GB.
What people only find out after building
Read this before you build on it. Each item links to the official page that says so.
A free web service sleeps after 15 minutes without traffic and takes about a minute to wake. The first customer of the morning waits that minute.
Official source: render.comThe free Postgres expires 30 days after you create it. After a 14-day grace period it is deleted, data included, and it has no backups.
Official source: render.comBackground workers and one-off jobs have no free option, and free services lose any local file on every restart or deploy.
Official source: render.comRegions are only in the US, Frankfurt and Singapore. There is no South American region.
Official source: render.comThe free Hobby workspace includes only 5 GB of bandwidth a month (Pro, $25, includes 25 GB). Past that it's $0.15 per GB.
Official source: render.com
Price
Web services from $7/month (Starter, 512 MB)
750 free instance hours a month (sleeps after 15 idle minutes) and a 1 GB Postgres that expires in 30 days.
- Free tier
- 750 hours/month, sleeps when idle
- First paid plan
- Starter: $7/month (512 MB)
- Best for
- Django, Rails, Express, Docker
Checked on Oct 28, 2026 · official pricing
What it costs in practice
Starter web service ($7) + Basic-256mb Postgres ($6) on the free Hobby workspace = $13/month. With 20 GB of traffic, the 15 GB over the included 5 GB add about $2.25: around $15/month. Estimate.
Estimate from the official price. Check it before you decide.
At a glance
- Free plan: yes
- Open source: no
“Not stated” means the official site doesn’t say.
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