Comparisons
cmdz vs a hyperscaler: cost predictability for AI builders
Three concrete workloads priced against the published rates of Vercel, Railway, Render, Fly and Cloudflare — including the two profiles where they win.
Comparisons written by a vendor are worth exactly as much as their willingness to lose. So: three workloads, public rates from July 2026, and the cases where we lose.
Workload A — the side project
A Next.js app with a small Postgres. Ten thousand visitors a month, about 60,000 requests, maybe 20 GB out.
| Monthly | |
|---|---|
| cmdz | € 7.46 |
| Railway | ~$12 (Hobby $5 + usage + $1 egress + database) |
| Render | ~$32 (Standard $25 + database $7) |
| Vercel | ~$20 (Pro seat; database from a marketplace partner, billed separately) |
| Fly.io | ~$9 (two shared-cpu machines + volume + egress) |
| Cloudflare | ~$5 (Workers Paid; D1 within free limits) |
Cloudflare wins this one, if your app fits the Workers model. If you wrote a Next.js app with a Node runtime and a Prisma client, it does not fit without a rewrite, and "rewrite it into isolates" is not a price comparison.
Fly is close to us and genuinely comparable on isolation. The difference is the ceiling, not the number.
Workload B — the app with revenue
Laravel with a queue worker, a scheduler, Postgres, Valkey and 20 GB of uploads. 100,000 visitors, about 600,000 requests, 180 GB out.
| Monthly | |
|---|---|
| cmdz | € 22.68 |
| Railway | ~$48 (usage + $9 egress + two databases) |
| Render | ~$64 (two instances + database + key-value + $12 egress) |
| Vercel | ~$45 (Pro + functions; Laravel is a poor fit regardless) |
| Fly.io | ~$34 (four machines + volumes + $3.60 egress) |
| Cloudflare | not applicable (no long-lived PHP process) |
We win this profile, and the reason is mostly the two managed services and the absence of an egress line.
Workload C — the one that goes viral
Workload B, on the day a post lands. Traffic × 40 for three days: 2.4 TB out, compute peaking at four times normal.
| That month | |
|---|---|
| cmdz, € 40 of credit | € 40.00 (ran out on day 25) |
| cmdz, € 100 of credit | € 79.20 (never ran out) |
| Railway | ~$120 (egress alone $120 at $0.05/GB) |
| Render | ~$310 ($0.15/GB beyond the allowance) |
| Vercel | ~$260 (Fast Data Transfer beyond 1 TB) |
| Fly.io | ~$82 ($0.02/GB) |
| Cloudflare | ~$14 (no egress charge) |
This is the whole argument on one line. On the day it matters, our number is either the actual usage or the number you chose in advance — and never anything else.
Note the two cmdz rows. 2.4 TB of egress is € 48 of the € 79.20 — real money, and the honest reason we are not "free egress". It is also € 312 less than Render would charge for the same traffic. With € 40 of credit the month costs exactly € 40 and the apps paused; with € 100 it costs what it used. Both outcomes are ones you selected in advance.
Cloudflare is dramatically cheapest here. Again: only if your app is already isolates.
Where they are better than us
This section is not decoration.
Cloudflare is cheaper than us at volume, and charges no egress. Nothing VM-based will beat isolates on cost per request. If your app already fits that model, use it.
Vercel's Next.js developer experience is better than ours. Preview deployments, image optimisation, ISR, the toolbar — years of depth in one framework. We do not win on Next.js depth and we are not going to claim we do.
Fly.io has our isolation quality and global placement. Firecracker versus Kata is a distinction without a practical difference. They have regions we do not.
Railway has a real hard limit and the best writing MCP in the field. They are the most dangerous competitor we have. Their limit has a $10 minimum and hitting it takes workloads offline, which they describe as possibly destructive; ours starts at € 0 and pauses rather than terminates. That is a difference of degree, not of kind, and we are not going to pretend it is a difference of kind.
Heroku's add-on ecosystem and Postgres tooling are richer than ours. Their MCP can do pg_outliers and pg_locks. We have cmdz_run_sql and backups.
Coolify on your own hardware is cheaper than us, full stop. If you have the time and the knowledge, you should do that. We sell the time and the knowledge, not the servers.
What we actually claim
Not "cheapest". Three things:
- Predictable. The invoice cannot exceed the number you set. On any other platform in this table except Railway and Netlify, it can.
- Egress at € 0.02/GB. Not free — we would rather charge for it than pretend — but 7.5× cheaper than the € 0.15 that Vercel and Render charge, which is where most of the difference in the tables above comes from.
- Operable by your agent. 47 tools with write access, bounded by that same ceiling — which is what makes handing over the keys a reasonable thing to do rather than a brave one.
If predictability is not worth anything to you and your traffic is flat and you have the time, Coolify on a Hetzner box is the correct answer and we will not be offended.
Method
Public rates from provider documentation, July 2026. Egress estimated at 350 KB average per request. Every figure is an estimate that depends on assumptions about your traffic; run yours through the calculator, which will also tell you when they are cheaper than us.
Something out of date? Email us. We will correct it, including when the correction is to our disadvantage.
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