Compared
Where the money actually differs.
Compute and memory cost roughly the same everywhere — everyone is renting the same machines. What separates the bills is seats, and what the platform will run at all.
Most platform comparisons are written to make one platform win. This set is written to make the arithmetic checkable: the rates are printed, the competitor figures are their own published list prices, and where a competitor is cheaper or better, it says so.
The short version: on a small always-on service the monthly totals land within a few dollars of each other across Railway, Render and Dockup, because the underlying machines cost what they cost. The differences that survive are structural — whether you pay per team member, and whether the platform will run a Windows VM or deploy to a server you own.
- Charged per team member
- Vercel yes, at $20 each. Dockup, Railway and Render no.
- Unit rates published
- Dockup and Railway publish per-unit prices. Render prices per instance size, Vercel per unit of a dozen different units.
- Linux VMs with root
- Dockup yes. Railway, Render, Vercel and Fly.io no.
- Windows VMs over RDP
- Dockup yes. None of the others.
- Deploy to servers you own
- Dockup yes, over SSH. None of the others.
What a comparison cannot tell you
Every platform on this list is capable of running a normal web application well. The choice is rarely about capability and usually about a specific constraint — a team that keeps growing, a Windows dependency nobody can remove, a server in a cupboard that has to stay.
If none of those apply, pick on the free tier and the docs, and stop reading comparison pages.
Read next
- Dockup, Render and Fly.ioDockup vs Render vs Fly.io compared for AI agent deployment, build workflows, private networking, previews, operations, pricing models, and team fit.
- Kubernetes or plain Docker — which do you needKubernetes and Docker are not alternatives -- one runs containers, the other schedules them across machines. Here is the question you actually meant to ask.
Questions this page gets asked
Is Dockup cheaper than Railway?
Not on compute and memory — those rates are effectively identical, because both are reselling the same class of machine. Dockup is cheaper on persistent storage and build minutes, and more expensive on egress. The structural difference is per-seat pricing, which Dockup does not charge.
Which platforms support Windows?
Of the platforms compared here, only Dockup. Railway, Render, Vercel and Fly.io run Linux containers only.
Do any of these charge per developer?
Vercel does, at $20 per developer seat on Pro. Dockup, Railway and Render charge for the workspace rather than the people in it.
Start on the free plan.
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