The Cost of Serverless Bandwidth
If only bandwidth is concerned, then:
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Serverless provides typically have a free plain, often with 100 GB free transfer per month. VPS provides usually have no free plan.
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The cheapest paid plan of both serverless and VPS provides often include 1 TB free transfer per month, but the cheapest VPS plan is usually cheaper than serverless.
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Overage is expensive compared to included transfer. Overage seems an afterthought for many serverless providers. They do not meter it, or handle it case by case, or enforce a soft limit, or charge a much more expensively, compared to VPS.
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Cloudflare offers a distinguished deal on bandwidth.
Comparison
| Provider | 1 GB | 100 GB | 1 TB | Overage per GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Digital Ocean App Platform | 0 | 12 | 102 | 0.10 |
| Netlify | 0 | 0 | 19 | 0.55 |
| Vercel | 0 | 0 | 20 | contact sale |
| Gatsby | 0 | 0 | 42.50 | contact |
| Render | 0 | 0 | 90 | 0.10 |
| Railway | 0 | 0 | n/a | n/a |
| Fly | 0 | 0 | 18 | 0.02/0.04/0.12 |
| LeanCloud | 0 | 7 | 97 | 0.10 |
| Heroku | 7 | 7 | 7 | n/a |
| GitHub Pages | 0 | 0 | n/a | n/a |
| Cloudflare Pages | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Digital Ocean Droplets | 4 | 4 | 4 | 0.01 |
| Linode Compute | 5 | 5 | 5 | 0.01 |
Details
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Digital Ocean App Platform The starter plan (free) has 1 GB bandwidth per month, Professional 100 GB, and $0.10/GB for overage.
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Netlify Starter 100 GB, Pro 1 TB, and $55 per 100 GB for overage.
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Vercel Hobby 100 GB, Pro 1 TB, and contact the sale to buy additional bandwidth.
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Gatsby Free 100 GB, Professional 1 TB. Gatsby does not charge for overage, and they will contact the user if they continue to exceed bandwidth limits.
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Render 100 GB free, then $0.10 per GB.
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Railway 100 GB free for all the plans. Overage billing is not mentioned on their pricing page. And I suspect overage billing or throttling has not been implemented yet on their platform yet since I found this paragraph on their documentation:
Railway doesn't meter bandwidth within Projects and the broader internet. As such, we have had projects handle unexpected traffic and features on major media publications. It is something we are very proud of. ... We do have plans to include private networking, static IPs, and allowing people to set up firewall rules to control permitted traffic within their projects.
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Fly 100/30/30 GB free for North America & Europe / Other / India, then $0.02/$0.04/$0.12 per GB. The price for 1 TB listed in the table above assumes bandwidth from North America or Europe.
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LeanCloud offers a free trial instance with 1 GB free bandwidth per day, then $0.1/GB for overage. The price listed in the table above assumes the site exceeds the free quota every day and there are 30 days in month. The free trial instance will hibernate if it has run more than 18 hours in the past 24 hours or no request is made in the past 30 minutes. The standard instance (no hibernation) costs $1.6 per day.
BTW, bandwidth usage was unmetered until Novermber 2019.
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Heroku The Hobby plan is the cheapest one, costing $7 per month. Bandwidth is soft limited at 2 TB. Overage bandwidth billing is not mentioned on their site.
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GitHub Pages is free and there is a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB per month.
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Cloudflare Pages features unlimited bandwidth. Use it for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is against their terms though.
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Both Digital Ocean and Linode includes 1 TB bandwidth for the cheapest VPS plan. Additional transfer is billed at $0.01 per GB.