PaaS Showdown 2025: Flightcontrol vs Vercel vs Railway vs Render vs Fly.io
The Platform Engineering Playbook Podcast​
Duration: 12-15 minutes Speakers: Alex and Jordan Target Audience: Senior platform engineers, SREs, DevOps engineers with 5+ years experience
đź“ť Read the full blog post: Deep dive into pricing, technical trade-offs, and decision frameworks for choosing the right PaaS platform.
Cold Open Hook​
Alex: ...so they're paying twelve hundred dollars a month for Vercel, right? And I ask them, "what would this cost on raw AWS?" Three hundred bucks. But here's the thing—managing that AWS infrastructure yourself means hiring a DevOps engineer at a hundred fifty grand a year.
Jordan: That's the AWS complexity tax in action. And that's exactly what we're unpacking today. Welcome to The Platform Engineering Playbook - I'm Jordan.
Alex: I'm Alex. This is the show where we dissect the technologies, trends, and decisions that shape platform engineering at scale.
Jordan: Today we're diving into the twenty twenty-five PaaS landscape. Flightcontrol, Vercel, Railway, Render, Fly dot io—everyone's promising Heroku-like simplicity with cloud-scale performance. But which one actually delivers?
Alex: And more importantly, when does the three to five X markup these platforms charge actually make economic sense?
The AWS Complexity Tax​
Jordan: So let's start with the fundamental question: why are we even talking about these platforms? What problem are they solving?
Alex: The AWS complexity tax is very real. A mid-sized team running typical web apps needs VPC configuration, load balancers, auto-scaling, managed databases, S3 with proper IAM, CloudFront CDN, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring infrastructure, disaster recovery plans. Doing this properly requires one to two dedicated DevOps engineers at a hundred fifty to two hundred K each.
Jordan: And the 2024 Platform Engineering survey found teams spend an average of thirty percent of their infrastructure time just maintaining deployment pipelines and dealing with AWS complexity.
Alex: Right. So PaaS platforms are trading money for time. The question is: is that trade-off worth it for your team?
Flightcontrol: The AWS Wrapper​
Jordan: Let's break down the five major players. Starting with Flightcontrol because it's the most interesting architecture—it deploys to your own AWS account.
Alex: Yeah, Flightcontrol is unique here. You're paying them ninety-seven to three ninety-seven dollars a month for a management layer, but the actual infrastructure costs go directly to AWS on your bill.
Jordan: So the pricing model is: Free tier for single users. Starter is ninety-seven a month for twenty-five users, includes five services. Business is three ninety-seven a month for a hundred users, includes ten services. Enterprise is custom pricing with SSO, SCIM, SOC 2 Type Two.
Alex: And critically—you pay AWS infrastructure costs separately. So for a typical startup with five services, you're looking at ninety-seven dollars for Flightcontrol plus maybe three hundred in AWS costs. About four hundred total.
Jordan: Compare that to Vercel running the same workload. Vercel Pro is twenty dollars per user—let's say three users, so sixty dollars. But then bandwidth overage for fifty gigs is four hundred bucks. Function execution adds another hundred. You're at five sixty total.
Alex: That's a hundred sixty a month savings, or about twenty-eight percent. And the gap widens as you scale.
Jordan: But Flightcontrol isn't for everyone. You need AWS knowledge for troubleshooting. Preview environments count as services and add up quickly. And you're not avoiding AWS entirely—you're just managing it more easily.
Alex: It makes economic sense when you're hitting Vercel's bandwidth or compute limits. Below fifty gigs monthly bandwidth, simpler platforms may be more cost-effective.
Vercel: Premium Developer Experience​
Jordan: Speaking of Vercel—let's talk about why people love it despite the cost.
Alex: Vercel's developer experience is genuinely exceptional. Zero-config Next dot JS deployments. Global edge network. Instant preview deployments for every pull request. If you're a frontend team, it's hard to beat.
Jordan: The pricing: Hobby tier is free but non-commercial only, with a hundred gigs bandwidth. Pro is twenty dollars per user plus usage, with twenty dollars included credit. Enterprise starts at thirty-five hundred a month but realistically you're looking at twenty to twenty-five K per year minimum.
Alex: And here's where it gets expensive—usage charges beyond included. Bandwidth starts at fifteen cents per gig with tier pricing. Function executions are pay-per-execution. Edge middleware has additional compute charges. Image optimization is billed per image.
Jordan: I've seen teams think they're on a twenty-dollar-a-month Pro plan, and then the bill comes in at over a thousand dollars.
Alex: Yeah, what looks like sixty bucks for three team members becomes eight hundred for bandwidth, a hundred fifty for functions—suddenly you're at a thousand and ten per month. Railway would be about a hundred twenty for the same workload. That's an eighty-eight percent premium.
Jordan: So when does Vercel make sense?
Alex: When developer experience justifies the premium. Frontend teams that absolutely need instant previews and edge optimization. Teams within the free tier limits for side projects. But be very careful about bandwidth and compute usage.
Railway: The Developer-First Alternative​
Jordan: Railway has been gaining a lot of traction. What's their play?
Alex: Railway is fascinating because they've nailed the balance between simplicity and flexibility. Their pricing is genuinely developer-friendly—five dollars a month minimum on the hobby plan, then pay-per-second for compute and egress.
Jordan: So walk me through a real scenario.
Alex: Let's say you're running a Next dot JS app with Postgres. Railway charges about five cents per GB egress and one cent per CPU-hour. For a typical low-traffic app—maybe ten gigs bandwidth, fifty CPU-hours—you're looking at about ten to fifteen bucks a month total.
Jordan: That's substantially cheaper than Vercel for similar workloads.
Alex: Absolutely. The catch is you don't get Vercel's edge network or their deep Next dot JS integrations. But for most apps, Railway's performance is perfectly fine. They use GCP infrastructure and have solid performance.
Jordan: What about at scale?
Alex: That's where it gets interesting. Railway doesn't have enterprise pricing tiers—you just pay for what you use. So if you're doing two hundred gigs bandwidth, you're at about ten dollars for egress plus maybe fifty for compute. Call it seventy bucks. Vercel would be over a thousand.
Jordan: So why isn't everyone using Railway?
Alex: Three reasons. One, no edge network—everything runs in one or two regions. Two, fewer integrations and framework optimizations. Three, smaller team means slower support response times. If you need enterprise SLAs or advanced features, you're looking at Vercel or Flightcontrol.
Render: The Transparent Pricing Play​
Jordan: Render's interesting because they're positioning themselves as the "honest pricing" platform.
Alex: Yeah, their pricing is refreshingly straightforward. Free tier for static sites and web services that spin down. Seven dollars a month for an always-on web service. Fifteen for Postgres, Redis at ten. No surprise charges, no bandwidth fees up to a hundred gigs.
Jordan: So for a typical app stack—web service, Postgres, Redis—you're at thirty-two dollars a month flat?
Alex: Exactly. And that includes a hundred gigs of bandwidth. If you need more, it's ten cents per gig after that. But they're betting most teams stay under a hundred.
Jordan: That's a compelling pitch for predictable budgets.
Alex: It really is. And their features are solid—zero-downtime deploys, preview environments, auto-deploy from GitHub. Not as polished as Vercel, but very usable.
Jordan: What are the trade-offs?
Alex: Performance is good but not exceptional. They use AWS behind the scenes but don't expose advanced AWS features. You can't customize infrastructure much—you're stuck with their service templates. And their free tier spins down after inactivity, which is annoying for demos.
Jordan: So Render is for teams that value simplicity and predictable costs over performance and flexibility?
Alex: Exactly. Small teams, side projects, simple apps. If your app fits their templates, it's a great choice.
Fly.io: The Technical Edge Platform​
Jordan: Fly dot io is the most technical of the bunch. What makes them different?
Alex: Fly is basically "run Docker containers anywhere in the world with intelligent routing." They have presence in thirty-plus regions globally and route requests to the nearest instance. It's like a CDN for your backend.
Jordan: That sounds powerful but complex.
Alex: It is both. Their Machines API lets you do things like run ephemeral containers that spin up on demand and shut down after requests complete. Pay-per-second billing means you only pay when code is actually running.
Jordan: Give me a concrete example.
Alex: Imagine you have a Next dot JS app with server-side rendering. You deploy to Fly in ten regions globally. A user in Sydney hits your app—Fly routes them to the Sydney instance. If that instance doesn't exist, Fly spins one up in under a second. User gets fast response, you only pay for those few seconds of compute.
Jordan: That's impressive. What's the catch?
Alex: You need to think distributed systems. Your app needs to handle being multi-region—database replication, cache invalidation, session management. Fly doesn't abstract that away; they give you primitives to build it yourself.
Jordan: So it's not for everyone.
Alex: Right. If you're just deploying a standard web app, Railway or Render is easier. Fly makes sense when you need edge deployment, have global users, or want technical control without managing Kubernetes.
Jordan: What about pricing?
Alex: It's usage-based. About two dollars per CPU-month, twenty-five cents per gig memory. Bandwidth is free up to a hundred gigs, then two cents per gig. For a typical app running twenty-four seven in three regions, maybe forty to sixty dollars a month.
Decision Framework​
Jordan: Okay, so we've covered five platforms. Let's give people a decision framework.
Alex: Use Flightcontrol when: You're a team of ten-plus engineers. You need AWS-specific services. You're hitting cost ceilings on other platforms. You have someone who knows AWS.
Jordan: Use Vercel when: You're heavily using Next dot JS. Developer experience is top priority. You need global edge network. Budget allows for premium pricing.
Alex: Use Railway when: You're a small team under ten people. You want simple pricing and good DX. You don't need enterprise features or edge deployment.
Jordan: Use Render when: You want predictable monthly bills. Your app fits standard templates. You value simplicity over advanced features.
Alex: And use Fly dot io when: You need global edge deployment. You have technical expertise. You want control over infrastructure. You're serving international users.
Closing Thoughts​
Jordan: The big insight here is that the right PaaS platform depends entirely on your team size, technical sophistication, and workload characteristics. There's no universal winner.
Alex: Exactly. The "best" platform is the one that matches your constraints—budget, team size, performance needs, and complexity tolerance.
Jordan: The fundamentals of good engineering remain constant, even as the landscape evolves.
Alex: That's what we're here for - cutting through the noise to help you make better decisions for your teams and your career.
Jordan: Thanks for tuning in to The Platform Engineering Playbook. Keep building thoughtfully.
Alex: Until next time.