Fly.io made a strong case for developers who want global edge deployments without managing Kubernetes. But in practice, many developers hit the same wall: unexpected bills, steep learning curves, and infrastructure complexity that belongs in a DevOps team's backlog, not a product team's sprint. If you're looking for a Fly.io alternative that prioritizes simplicity and predictable pricing, this guide breaks down what you actually need to know.
Why Developers Look for Fly.io Alternatives
Fly.io is a capable platform. It offers low-latency global routing, VM-level isolation, and a Rust-based proxy stack with genuine technical merit. But capability and usability are different things. Several recurring problems push developers to look elsewhere.
Unpredictable Billing
Fly.io has no built-in spending caps or budget alerts. Developers regularly report bills running 2 to 4 times their estimates, often caused by idle VMs left running, per-region resource charges, snapshot storage accumulation, and egress fees that aren't visible until the invoice arrives. For side projects and early-stage products, financial unpredictability is a dealbreaker.
The platform does offer a free tier with shared VMs, but the moment your app grows beyond basic usage, costs can scale in ways that are difficult to forecast without detailed knowledge of how Fly.io meters each resource type.
Infrastructure Complexity
Fly.io operates at a lower abstraction level than most PaaS platforms. That's intentional. The platform gives you direct control over machines, volumes, private networking, and multi-region placement. For teams with DevOps expertise, that control is valuable. For product-focused teams or solo developers, it translates into hours spent reading documentation about flyctl commands, fly.toml configuration, WireGuard networking, and machine state management.
Steep Learning Curve for Standard Use Cases
Deploying a web application and a database on Fly.io requires understanding concepts that most developers shouldn't need to engage with: machine sizing, volume attachment, region selection trade-offs, and proxy configuration. A developer deploying a Node.js API with PostgreSQL on Fly.io faces a meaningful operational burden before writing a single line of product code.
Multi-Region by Default, Whether You Need It or Not
Fly.io's architecture optimizes for multi-region workloads. That's valuable for high-traffic, latency-sensitive global applications. For the majority of applications that serve users in one or two regions, the additional configuration overhead adds cost and complexity without a corresponding performance benefit.
Quick Comparison: Fly.io vs. Out Plane
| Feature | Fly.io | Out Plane |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per-VM, per-resource, per-region | Per-second compute, transparent |
| Spending controls | No caps or alerts | Predictable per-second billing |
| Free credit | Shared VM free tier | $20 credit, no credit card required |
| Support cost | $29/month (Launch plan) | Included |
| Setup complexity | High (flyctl, fly.toml, volumes) | Low (GitHub connect, deploy) |
| Database management | Manual volume + Fly Postgres | Managed PostgreSQL (automated) |
| Load balancing | Manual Anycast configuration | Automatic |
| Auto-scaling | Manual machine management | Automatic based on traffic |
| Observability | Basic logs, third-party required | Built-in metrics and logs |
| Target user | DevOps-experienced teams | Product-focused developers |
| Multi-region | First-class, required knowledge | Single-region default, enterprise multi-region |
| Time to first deploy | 30-60 minutes | Under 5 minutes |
Pricing Comparison
Pricing is where the differences become most concrete for small teams and individual developers.
Fly.io Pricing
Fly.io charges separately for compute (shared and dedicated VMs), persistent volumes, network egress, IP addresses, and snapshots. The free tier covers shared VMs with limited RAM and CPU. Paid usage bills per second of compute time, but the multi-dimensional pricing model makes it difficult to estimate monthly costs without running your app and monitoring actual usage.
Paid support starts at $29/month on the Launch plan. There are no spending cap features, and budget overruns from forgotten machines or unexpected egress are a documented risk for users who don't actively monitor their dashboards.
Out Plane Pricing
Out Plane uses per-second billing on a single unified rate based on instance type. You pick your compute tier, and billing scales cleanly with the seconds your application runs. New accounts receive $20 in free credit with no credit card required.
There are no separate charges for load balancing, internal networking between services, or basic monitoring. Managed PostgreSQL and Redis instances bill at flat rates that are visible before you provision. The pricing structure is designed so you can estimate your monthly cost before you deploy, not after.
The practical difference: on Fly.io, a developer running a web app, a background worker, and a Postgres database may encounter four to six separate metered resources. On Out Plane, those components map to a small number of clearly priced line items.
Key Differences
DevOps-Heavy vs. Managed Platform
Fly.io gives you VMs. Managing those VMs, including start/stop state, volume attachments, health checks, and restart policies, is your responsibility. Out Plane manages the runtime layer. You deploy your application and define your resource requirements. The platform handles instance health, restarts, and scheduling.
This distinction matters operationally. On Fly.io, a crashed machine may require manual intervention depending on your configuration. On Out Plane, unhealthy instances are replaced automatically without requiring developer action.
Manual Volume and Machine Management vs. Automatic
Persistent storage on Fly.io requires creating and attaching Fly Volumes explicitly. Each volume is region-specific, requires capacity planning, and does not automatically expand. If your app runs in multiple regions, volume management becomes more complex.
Out Plane's managed databases handle storage, backups, and capacity automatically. You specify your PostgreSQL version and initial size. The platform manages growth, automated backups, and point-in-time recovery without requiring manual intervention.
Multi-Region-First vs. Single-Region Simplicity
Fly.io's routing layer is built around Anycast global IP routing. This is genuinely useful if you need requests to automatically route to the nearest Fly region. It also means that understanding how your app behaves globally, including data locality concerns with multi-region Postgres, requires significant operational knowledge.
Out Plane defaults to single-region deployment. For most applications, this is the correct choice. You pick a region close to your users and your database, and the platform handles the rest. Multi-region deployment is available on enterprise plans for teams that have a real latency requirement, not as a default complexity that everyone must navigate.
Complex Networking vs. Automatic Load Balancing
Fly.io uses private networking through WireGuard and its internal 6PN network. Configuring service-to-service communication requires understanding how Fly's internal DNS and networking layer works. Exposing services publicly requires Anycast IP configuration and proxy rules.
Out Plane handles load balancing and internal networking automatically. Services deployed on the platform can communicate through built-in service discovery. Public endpoints are automatically load balanced across running instances. Developers don't configure networking layers.
When Fly.io Still Makes Sense
Fly.io is the better choice in specific circumstances.
Multi-region latency requirements: If your application needs to process requests within 50ms for users across multiple continents, Fly.io's global Anycast routing is a genuine technical advantage. The edge-first architecture solves a real problem for globally distributed applications with strict latency requirements.
Teams with existing DevOps expertise: If your team includes engineers comfortable with systems-level infrastructure, Fly.io's lower abstraction level gives you control that managed platforms don't offer. You can fine-tune machine sizing, configure custom health checks, and manage networking at a level of precision that PaaS platforms abstract away.
Edge computing and WebAssembly workloads: Fly.io has invested in edge function capabilities and runs workloads close to users using their distributed compute layer. If your use case involves processing at the edge rather than in a central region, Fly.io has built specifically for that scenario.
When Out Plane Is a Better Fit
Out Plane is the better choice for the broader set of use cases that don't require edge computing or multi-continent global routing.
Single-region applications: The majority of web applications serve users in one geographic area. An API serving European users belongs in a European data center. A backend serving US customers belongs in a US region. Single-region deployment is simpler, cheaper, and easier to reason about. Out Plane is optimized for this model.
Teams without dedicated DevOps resources: If your team is primarily product engineers, the operational overhead of Fly.io takes time away from building features. Out Plane handles the infrastructure layer so developers can focus on application code. Managed databases, automatic scaling, built-in observability, and automatic SSL eliminate entire categories of operational work.
Predictable billing: If billing surprises affect your team's ability to plan, Out Plane's transparent per-second billing resolves the problem. You can estimate costs before deploying and monitor actual usage against those estimates without worrying about hidden resource charges.
Managed databases: Out Plane provides managed PostgreSQL with automated backups, point-in-time recovery, and connection pooling. If you want a database you can connect to immediately without managing Fly Volumes, Fly Postgres configuration, or replication setup, Out Plane's managed database service is operationally simpler.
Quick deployment: Getting from a GitHub repository to a running production application takes under five minutes on Out Plane. You connect your GitHub account, select a repository, configure environment variables, and click deploy. No CLI installation, no fly.toml configuration, no region placement decisions required to get started.
Summary
Fly.io is a capable platform with real advantages for developers who need global edge routing and who have the DevOps background to manage it effectively. For most development teams, that profile doesn't match. The billing unpredictability, infrastructure complexity, and steep learning curve create friction that slows down product development without delivering proportional benefits.
Out Plane provides the deployment simplicity that most applications actually need: managed databases, automatic scaling, built-in observability, and transparent per-second pricing. You deploy from GitHub, your infrastructure scales with your traffic, and your bill reflects what you used, not what you accidentally left running.
Ready for simple, predictable deployments? Get started with Out Plane and receive $20 in free credit.