Ask HN: Does anyone still offer free hosting for Ruby on Rails apps?

4 points·bradly··5 comments

Heroku and Fly.io both seem to be charging for there smallest plans (although I'm not confident in my understanding Fly.io's pricing tbh).

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What about railway.app with their basic free tier? I had hosted couple of ruby on rails app but my free credits are almost over.

Render will host Rails apps, but if you can share more about what your app is, what other tech you need (Redis, PostgreSQL, uptime, etc) you can get more specific help.

All I really need is my app process and a relational database. SQLite would be fine, but being filesystem based doesn't work with with Heroku or Fly.io.

Heroku's cheapest Postgres server is $5. I don't have the advanced math degree needed to understand Fly's pricing on relational dbs. The cheapest RDS instance came in around $12 a month.

At this point I think my cheapest option is either Heroku Eco dyno + Mini Postgres at $10 or a single ec2 instance running both my app and db. A nano instance is $3 a month, but it's unclear how the nano will fare with a db and app running concurrently.

edit: I wasn't familiar with Render. I'm trying it now.

We actually have first class SQLite support on Fly.io with LiteFS. You should be able to run a Rails app for ~$5 per month in that config.

Thanks for this, but I'm struggling to understand how that lines up with what I'm reading in the docs. I see $5 for the hobby plan and then "$5 per month for up to 10GB of database storage" for LiteFS. I cannot tell if a relational db of any kind is included in the hobby plan. It seems like I need to add a payment method to find the details of the plan. What am I missing here?

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