Yeah it would be great if it could be used 100% free, but paying for file storage, email delivery and hosting are usually the 3 most basic ones you will have to pay anyway as you typically don't want to store files in file disk of your deployed app, you want to use an email delivery to not get into spam of everyone and you need somewhere to host it (unless you own servers).

Everything else should be (and is) optional.

Neither of us is going to convince each other of who is "right" because we're both right in our own ways :P

I was just wondering if there was an actual, quantifiable resource for knowing what running this costs.

To answer your question you’d need to provide details like expected number of users/amount of traffic, emails sent, how many and big files are uploaded etc etc. Without those details it’s an impossible question. I host multiple apps based on epic-stack for free, but none of them have massive amounts of usage.

I appreciate that! That's pretty much what I was hoping for: someone actually using this that weighs in on your actual costs. Thank you!

But yeah, I would start with:

• 0 traffic
• 0 emails
• 0 files

The answer seems to be "free" (at least for now), which is good!

I should probably mention that staying free is not a priority for this project. The priority is making great user experiences with a foundation that scales and adapts to real world production applications. Perhaps it would be useful for me to add this as an explicit guiding principle: https://github.com/epicweb-dev/epic-stack/blob/main/docs/guiding-principles.md

Making that explicit seems like a good idea, to me anyway :)

I think a lot of people will assume that it's libre + gratis. Or maybe that's just me at this point. I ono.

Thanks for putting in the time/money/effort to do the research!

Thanks for putting in the effort to create such a nice stack!

I don't believe you've actually shown that you're not being charged. Only that you're possibly grandfathered in to having free data usage. New accounts (like mine) don't get that. Are you willing to share the actual invoice like I did?

If not, could you show CPU usage? My data was 0ドル since they're not being used. It was the CPU usage that charged.

Is this what you're looking for?
invoice

I just checked and you're right, I've been grandfathered in to the "Legacy Hobby Plan", which I guess it's cheaper.
Screenshot 2025年09月09日 at 10 02 25

Any idea how much cheaper it is?

Yeah, that doesn't exist for people creating new accounts! Nice for you, though ;)

It does seem like even your CPU usage is cheaper. I wonder if it includes whatever forgiveness they're granting, or if this represents a performance regression in the stack...

That's an interesting question. I guess we could compare CPU usage. Here's my Graphana CPU graph for the last 30 days. I haven't changed the code for this project since May, but notice there was a decrease in CPU usage 2 days ago. That might have been Fly making changes or dealing with an issue.

Sidenote: Something coming to my stack is Scale to Zero. Since VMs on Fly startup in ~10ms, it's an interesting use-case having multiple instances across the globe, close to your users, all configured with Scale to Zero, and booting up in ~10ms if they haven't been used for a few seconds. Theoretically, this would allow maximum performance with minimum cost, with the occasional user incurring a performance hit of +~10ms, which is barely perceivable.

I killed my machines after running this (I'd rather not pay for something I'm not using yet) and it seems like Grafana has "no data" even for the time I was running it, so I don't think I can post my comparative data.

Definitely interesting to be able to sleep and wake up. I naively imagine all this fancy cloud stuff would do that by default. :)