Best app hosting for side projects

Combined ranking

1. 1
   Railway—13 pts

   GPT #3Claude #1Gemini #1

   Best deploy-from-repo DX in the business — one-click Postgres/Redis, usage-based pricing that scales to zero-ish for side projects, sane logs and cron, no YAML; it's the closest thing to "Heroku in its prime" for 2026 indie hackers

   To stay #1 Restore a true always-free tier (the $5 trial credit runs out) so hobbyists can park dormant projects without a card

2. 2
   Fly.io—8 pts

   GPT #5Claude #2Gemini #3

   Real containers on real VMs in 30+ regions, scale-to-zero machines, gRPC/WebSockets/anything-TCP just works, and pricing stays cheap for tiny apps; most control per dollar without doing ops

   To rank higher Smooth out reliability and support rough edges — indie hackers still trade horror stories about opaque incidents and debugging platform-side failures alone

3. 3
   Render—7 pts

   GPT #4Claude #3Gemini #4

   Heroku-style simplicity with a genuinely free web-service tier, managed Postgres, cron jobs, and preview environments; the safest default for someone who never wants to think about infra

   To rank higher Fix free-tier cold starts (spun-down services take ~30s+ to wake) which makes free-tier demos embarrassing

4. 4
   Vercelincumbent▲27 pts

   GPT #1Claude #5Gemini #5

   Best DX for Next.js and React apps, instant Git deploys, previews, global CDN, serverless/edge compute, strong AI/app tooling, and enough free/pro capacity for most indie launches

   To rank higher Make pricing and usage limits simpler and less surprise-prone

5. 5
   Cloudflare Workersincumbent—6 pts

   GPT #2Claude #4Gemini —

   Excellent price-performance, global edge runtime, generous free/low-cost scaling, strong security/CDN defaults, and expanding storage/backend primitives

   To rank higher Make full-stack app deployment and debugging feel as polished as Vercel

6. 6
   CCoolify▼24 pts

   GPT —Claude —Gemini #2

   Self-hosted PaaS that runs on any cheap VPS, providing a Heroku-like deployment experience with zero markup fees.

   To rank higher Offer a fully-managed cloud tier to remove the burden of manual OS updates and server maintenance.

Rank history

By model

Tracked by ModelsAgree · rank 1 = 5 pts … rank 5 = 1 pt · re-polled continuously