Render.com is a fantastic service. It’s a cloud provider that makes the right stuff easy.
- The happy path is automatic deploys from your git provider.
- It has first-class infrastructure-as-code support via its blueprint files.
- It skips the complex IAM systems of AWS and GCP.
- It ships a limited (though growing) number of primitives that can be used to build the majority of things I’d want to build. Currently around ten, depending on how you count, compared to more than 300 at AWS.
- Its pricing is straight-forward and predictable.
I’ve been a fairly big user of render.com for a while, even hosting TaskRatchet on it for two years.
For a while now I’ve been migrating off of Render.com, moving most of my work to Cloudflare. The only things I’m still hosting on Render.com are a few static websites.
Why the switch?
The main reason: It’s expensive.
Simple pricing doesn’t mean cheap. And my usage pattern, building many side projects which probably won’t get much usage, is just about the worst scenario. A server project typically needs at minimum a public computer service and a PostgreSQL database. To avoid cold starts and losing data, that means paying, at minimum, $7 / month for the compute service and $6 / month for the database, or $13 / month all-in. And that’s even if I’m the only one ever using the project. if I want five such projects, I’m easily paying $65 / month or more.
So at this point Cloudflare turns out to be a way better fit. It’s way cheaper, and the architectures it naturally pushes you toward mean I’m paying for what I use rather than paying for instance that are doing nothing most of the time. Plus Cloudflare-hosted projects tend to be really fast. Since I’m using Claude Code, I don’t have any issues configuring the cloud infrastructure. And it gives me more flexibility in how I can build things while still avoiding the incredible complexity of something like AWS.
I’m happy with the move.