Pay for the seconds it runs
A machine is charged for its processor and memory only while it is awake, and for its disk while it exists. Asleep, it costs disk and nothing else. There is no fee per machine, per app or per person, and no limit on how many you run.
Three things are charged
Processor
$0.018 per vCPU-hour $0.000005 a second
Per vCPU, by the second, while the machine is awake. A machine goes to sleep two seconds after its last request, and from then on this stops.
Memory
$0.0072 per GiB-hour $0.000002 a second
Per GiB, by the second, while the machine is awake. A sleeping machine holds no memory anywhere, so it is not charged for any.
Disk
$0.04 per GB-month
Awake or asleep. A volume counts at the size you gave it when you made it, whether or not it is full, as volumes do on Fly, so give it the size you need. A machine’s checkpoints and the blocks it wrote to its own disk count at what they hold. The image it was made from is shared and is not charged.
Nothing else is charged: not outbound transfer, builds, requests, wakes, seats or domains, and not the number of machines, apps, volumes or checkpoints you keep.
Start free, with no card
Sign up with GitHub and use pilots. You never type a card number to create machines or deploy apps inside the trial or the monthly allowance.
First, a one-time trial: $5 at list price, spent before anything else, for 30 days from when you sign up. After that, every month:
The trial and the allowance are yours, not one team’s. The allowance renews on the first of every month (UTC) and covers every team you own, together. It is enough for a small app that sleeps between requests, which is how an app on pilots spends most of its day, or for a short agent session most days.
When a team without a card has used it, its machines go to sleep and stay asleep until you add a card or the month turns. Nothing is deleted: every disk, volume, checkpoint and address is where it was, and the first request after that wakes the machine as usual.
A GitHub account younger than 30 days gets a fifth of the trial and of the allowance until it is that old. That, signing in, and rate limits are how the free allowance is protected from people opening many accounts, instead of asking you for a card.
Add a card when you need more
The allowance still comes first
With a card on file, what you use past the free allowance is charged at the end of the month at the prices above. There is no plan to choose and no monthly fee.
Small months are not charged
A month whose bill comes to less than $1 is not charged at all.
A budget, if you want one
Set a monthly budget and your machines sleep when the bill reaches it, the same way they do at the end of the free allowance. It is the only spending limit there is, and only you set it.
If a monthly charge fails, you have seven days to pay it, from the link in the
dashboard, in pilot billing or in the email from the payment page. After that
the team’s machines sleep the same way until it is paid, and nothing is deleted.
You can remove the card at any time: what is owed so far that month is charged, and
the team goes back to the free allowance (pilot billing card remove).
Add the card from the terminal with pilot billing card, which opens the
payment page in your browser. pilot billing shows what this month has used
so far and what is left of the allowance.
Two machines, worked out
A sandbox for an agent
One vCPU and one GiB, awake two hours a day for thirty days, with five GB kept all month.
processor, sixty hours at the hourly rate
memory, sixty GiB-hours
disk, five GB-months
$1.71 at list price, and $0.36 after the free allowance, which is under the monthly minimum and so is not charged. Without a card, the sandbox would sleep once the allowance is used.
An app that never sleeps
The same size, awake every hour of the month, with one GB of disk.
processor, every hour of the month
memory, every hour of the month
disk, one GB-month
$18.44 at list price, and $17.10 after the free allowance.
The second one is rare here. A web app on pilots goes to sleep two seconds after its last request and wakes on the next one, so an app that serves people during the day is charged for the time it spends answering them and not for the night.
Work out your own
Processor
$1.08
Memory
$0.43
Disk
$0.20
A month, list price
$1.71
After the free allowance: $0.00
Counted over thirty days, with the disk kept the whole month, after the monthly allowance and not counting the one-time trial. The allowance belongs to you rather than to one machine, so a second machine shares it.
Next to the others
The same two machines, priced from each platform’s own published rates. Hover a figure to see where it was read and how it was worked out.
| Platform | Processor, memory an hour | The sandbox | The app that never sleeps |
|---|---|---|---|
| pilotsa whole vCPU, charged while awake | $0.018 and $0.0072 | $1.71 | $18.44 |
| Fly Machines, performancea dedicated vCPU, the smallest size has two GB | $0.0292 and $0.0083 | $3.50 | $33.61 |
| Fly Spritescharged for the processor and memory actually used | $0.0385 and $0.0219 | $3.93 | $44.59 |
| Railwaycharged for what a service uses, with a monthly plan minimum | $0.0278 and $0.0139 | $5.00 | $30.59 |
| E2Bsandboxes only, sessions end after a day at most | $0.0504 and $0.0162 | $4.00 | not offered |
| Daytonasandboxes, disk charged by the hour | $0.0504 and $0.0162 | $4.39 | $48.70 |
| Cloudflare Containerscharged for the processor actually used, disk lost on sleep | $0.072 and $0.009 | $9.21 | $63.59 |
The competitor totals assume the processor is busy the whole time it is awake. Sprites, Railway and Cloudflare charge for the processor time actually used, so a machine that mostly waits costs less there than this table shows. On pilots that waiting time is mostly spent asleep, which is where the difference goes. Fly also sells a shared processor, a sixteenth of a core most of the time, for less than any row here.
Read on the day these prices took effect. Every figure carries the page it came from. The longer comparisons cover more than price.