Pricing
We're still building this page out. In the meantime: RunOS is completely free today, unlimited nodes, unlimited clusters, no credit card needed.
Start freeStructural comparison
RunOS vs. the platform-markup model
Railway, Render, Heroku, and Vercel all change their prices often enough that any dollar figure we put in a table would be stale by the time you read it. So this page doesn't try to out-quote them. It compares how each platform's pricing works: who bills you, who owns the infrastructure, and what it costs to leave.
There's exactly one real number on this page: RunOS is $0. Unlimited nodes, unlimited clusters, no credit card. That's not an intro rate, it's the whole 1.0 product, and you can go verify it in about ninety seconds.
Billing model
Who sends you an invoice, and what it's priced against.
| Platform | Who bills you | Priced against |
|---|---|---|
| RunOS | Nobody. The software is $0. Your cloud provider bills you directly, at their own list price. | Nothing. There's no RunOS meter on top of your compute. |
| Railway | Railway, on a usage-metered account. | CPU-seconds, RAM-seconds, and egress, priced by Railway above their underlying cloud cost. |
| Render | Render, on a per-service and per-seat plan. | Instance types Render defines, at Render's price per instance-hour. |
| Heroku | Heroku (Salesforce), on a per-dyno plan. | Dyno tiers, a Heroku-specific unit that maps to underlying compute at a markup. |
| Vercel | Vercel, on a per-seat plan plus usage. | Function invocations, build minutes, and bandwidth, metered and priced by Vercel. |
The pattern: four platforms meter something and price it above the underlying cloud cost. RunOS doesn't meter anything, because it isn't the thing being billed.
Where your servers live
This is the root of the pricing difference, not a footnote to it.
| Platform | Infrastructure model |
|---|---|
| RunOS | BYOC. RunOS is control-plane software that runs on top of standard Kubernetes, on servers you already own or rent: Hetzner, AWS, GCP, your own rack, whatever. RunOS never touches your cloud bill. |
| Railway | Managed. Your workload runs on Railway's infrastructure, on capacity Railway provisions and owns. |
| Render | Managed. Your services run inside Render's own AWS/GCP footprint, abstracted behind Render's plans. |
| Heroku | Managed. Your dynos run on Heroku's AWS infrastructure. You never see or choose the underlying account. |
| Vercel | Managed. Your functions and builds run on Vercel's infrastructure across its own multi-cloud footprint. |
What happens if you leave
The part of pricing nobody puts in the pricing table.
| Platform | Exit mechanics |
|---|---|
| RunOS | You get your own kubeconfig. It's standard Kubernetes the whole way down, so you can stop using RunOS's console at any time and keep operating the cluster directly, or move the manifests to any other Kubernetes anywhere. Nothing about your workload is RunOS-proprietary. |
| Railway | Leaving means re-platforming: rebuilding your services on a different provider's deploy model, config format, and networking. |
| Render | Same shape. Render's service definitions and infra don't travel, so you migrate to the next platform's format from scratch. |
| Heroku | Dynos, buildpacks, and the Heroku Postgres/Redis add-ons are Heroku-specific. Leaving means rebuilding the deploy pipeline elsewhere. |
| Vercel | Vercel-specific routing, edge functions, and build config need to be re-implemented on whatever you move to next. |
"Export" isn't the same as "disconnect." A config export still leaves you re-platforming. A kubeconfig doesn't.
Free tier shape
Not all "free" means the same thing.
| Platform | What "free" actually gets you |
|---|---|
| RunOS | The entire 1.0 product. Unlimited nodes, unlimited clusters, all 20+ managed services, no feature gate. Free isn't a tier, it's the product. |
| Railway | A capped usage allowance meant to demo the product, then funnel you onto a metered plan. |
| Render | Limited instance types and hours, enough to try a hobby project, not enough to run something real. |
| Heroku | No meaningful free tier since 2022. Entry point starts as a paid Eco dyno. |
| Vercel | A single-seat hobby plan with usage caps, gated away from team and production features. |
Try the numbers yourself
Since RunOS doesn't add a platform fee, the entire cost of running your cluster is whatever your infrastructure provider charges. Price the same cluster across providers below, RunOS on Hetzner against the rest, and see what the markup on the other platforms would have actually cost you.
FAQ
Why doesn't this table show competitor prices?
Because they change, sometimes a few times a year, and a stale number is worse than no number. The mechanics in this table, metered billing, managed infrastructure, config lock-in, don't change nearly as often. That's what's worth comparing.
Is RunOS's $0 price also going to change?
There's no announced future pricing model. If that changes, it'll be a clear, separate announcement, not a quiet edit to this page. Until then, treat "free today" as exactly that: today's real price, not an introductory one.
Could RunOS add a markup on infrastructure later?
Not without breaking the thing that makes this table possible. The entire pitch is that you pay your provider, not us. Reversing that would be a different product.
What if I want SSO or audit logs down the line?
Those are on the roadmap, not shipped yet. When they land, they won't change anything in this table: your infrastructure is still yours, still billed directly, still exitable with a kubeconfig.