Cloudflare Pages vs Fly.io

Cloudflare Pages is the “set it and forget it” hosting option. Unlimited bandwidth on the free tier means you never worry about traffic spikes: if your blog post goes viral, you do not get a surprise bill. The free plan includes 500 builds a month, and Cloudflare’s Pro plan ($20/mo billed annually, $25 monthly) raises that to 5,000. The site you are reading right now runs on Cloudflare Pages.

Cloudflare’s documentation now says “Start new projects with Workers”, describing Workers as its primary platform for building applications and noting that it supports most Pages use cases with a broader feature set. Pages is still offered, and Cloudflare publishes a guide for moving a Pages project to Workers. The tradeoff is developer experience: Vercel and Netlify have smoother workflows, faster builds, and more integrations. But if your priority is reliable, fast, cheap hosting that does not punish you for success, it is hard to beat free-with-unlimited-bandwidth.

Fly.io takes your Docker container and runs it on servers around the world. Your app in Tokyo, Sao Paulo, and Amsterdam simultaneously, not behind a CDN, but actually running there. For apps where latency matters (real-time features, APIs, databases), this is the real deal.

The free tier gives you 3 shared VMs with 256MB RAM each, which can run a small app and a Postgres database. Beyond that, pricing is usage-based starting at $1.94/month for a shared-cpu VM. The tradeoff versus Railway or Render is complexity: Fly gives you more control over where your code runs, but you need to understand containers, config files, and networking basics. If you just want to push code and forget about it, Railway is easier. If you want your API to respond in under 50ms for users worldwide, Fly.io is worth the setup.