Vercel Alternatives for Full-Stack Apps
8 places for an app with a real backend and a database, priced with a password on staging
If your app has a real backend and a PostgreSQL database, the cheapest place to move it from Vercel is Light Cloud at $5 a month for the frontend, the API and the database together, with a password on staging included. Railway comes to about $6 once the RAM and CPU it bills by are counted, and adds workers and cron. Netlify, Google Cloud Run, DigitalOcean and Render land between $9 and $13.30, and Fly.io near $40 with managed Postgres. Cloudflare sells no Postgres of its own, so it comes last. On Vercel itself, Pro is $20 a month per seat and another $20 a month per project for the staging password, and the database comes from a second vendor: Vercel and Neon together come to $20 to $40.
We make Light Cloud, the first row below. The method comes first so you can check every number.
Why full-stack apps leave Vercel
Vercel is excellent at what it was built for, and a Next.js frontend is still happiest there. The friction starts when the app grows a backend of its own.
Vercel runs backend code as request-driven Functions, billed by active CPU and memory while requests are in flight (pricing docs). A Docker image can run too, but as a Function, in beta, and it scales down after 5 minutes without traffic (Container Runtime). For anything that has to keep running, Vercel's own guide is refreshingly direct: such processes "can stay on Render, Railway, Amazon ECS, or Kubernetes" (guide).
Then there's the database, which Vercel doesn't sell itself; Postgres comes from a Marketplace partner such as Neon or Supabase, on their bill (storage docs). And on 2026-09-09 a shared password on a project became $20 per project a month on Pro. A team with a staging site per client feels that one quickly.
How we ranked
The reference app is the same one as in where to host a SaaS app: a React frontend, one Node.js API, a small PostgreSQL database and a custom domain, at about 1,000 API requests a day. Every platform gets its cheapest plan that allows a commercial app. Prices are list prices from the vendors' own pages, checked on 2026-10-13 and again on 2026-11-02, in US dollars. Where a platform bills by usage, the price is the usage this app generates, not the plan's starting fee, so no row hides its bill behind a "+". Every row is one vendor; a platform that does not sell the database itself is listed as n/a, and its section says what a partner database would add.
Two columns cover what full-stack teams ask about first: whether the platform runs background workers and scheduled jobs, which Vercel does with Cron and Queues, and what a password on a staging site costs.
Kept running all month, with no scale to zero, the same app gets the Always on prices in the table. Light Cloud comes sixth of eight there at about $56, because an always-on instance needs the $19 Starter plan and a Micro costs about $52 a month. Google Cloud Run can keep a minimum instance warm at its lower idle rate, about $5 a month at a quarter of a vCPU. Platforms that run the API only as functions have no documented way to keep it running, so they're listed last.
The ranking
1. Light Cloud
Best for: apps whose backend is an ordinary web server and whose staging needs a password.
Lite is $5 a month and includes $5 of usage, a custom domain and one shared PostgreSQL database (pricing). The reference app uses about $4.70 of it: $4 for the database and $0.30 for 1 GB of data in it, about $0.20 for the API at 0.2 s per request and $0.12 an instance-hour, about $0.06 for 0.3 GB of API responses at $0.20 per GB, a cent for the static frontend and a few cents of builds. Your API is a container running your server as you wrote it, Express or FastAPI or Spring, and it scales to zero between requests. That makes this full-stack hosting outside Vercel where the backend isn't squeezed into a function.
A visitor password works on any environment on any plan, Free included, as one setting; the staging tutorial takes about five minutes. Both halves ship from one repository with git push deploys for the frontend and the API. Every branch gets a preview of the frontend and API together, and the database is PostgreSQL that lives next to the API, on the same invoice. Next.js with server rendering runs too, via next start in a container, as the Next.js tutorial shows.
Read this part before you move. Redirect and rewrite rules in vercel.json are ignored, as are netlify.toml and _redirects, so any routing you configured there has to move into the app. There are no cron jobs, no queues and no background workers, all of which Vercel has. Services talk over public HTTPS because there's no private network, the shared database tier runs in Belgium only, and an idle API takes 3.1 to 3.7 seconds to answer its first request.
2. Railway
Best for: backends that need workers, cron and private networking for about $1 more a month.
Hobby is $5 a month and includes $5 of usage, with RAM at $10 per GB a month and CPU at $20 per vCPU a month, billed for actual use (plans). For the reference app that's about $5.83: roughly $2.50 for a Node.js API averaging 250 MB, $2 for Postgres at 200 MB, 50 cents for a small server for the React build, 60 cents of CPU and cents for the volume and egress. The bill is the larger of $5 and the usage, so about $6, and the same always on, because 1,000 requests a day rarely leave the API idle long enough to sleep. Cron jobs start a service on a schedule, and services talk over a private WireGuard network on every plan (pricing). Pull request environments copy the whole app.
For a full-stack app with a queue worker, Railway is the closest thing to "Vercel plus a backend" at this price. The gap is access control: gating a staging service behind a Railway login needs the $5,000-a-month committed tier, and Railway recommends Pro at $20 for commercial apps.
3. Netlify
Best for: frontend-heavy apps whose backend fits in functions.
Personal is $9 a month for 1,000 credits; Pro is $20 for 3,000 credits with unlimited seats (plans). The reference app's requests, function time and 1.5 GB of bandwidth come to about 60 credits a month and each production deploy costs 15, so Personal covers it with room for about 60 deploys. Netlify Database is a first-party managed Postgres, and every deploy preview gets its own database branch with a copy of production data, with no partner integration to set up. Its price isn't published, so $9 is the bill without it.
The backend is functions: 60 seconds for synchronous calls, 15 minutes in background functions, 30 seconds for scheduled ones (function limits). I found no always-on server option in the docs. The staging password needs Pro, which is $20 flat for the whole team rather than per project.
4. Google Cloud Run, used directly
Best for: teams comfortable in Google Cloud who want raw container prices.
Our containers run on Cloud Run, so this is the build-it-yourself version of row 1. The free tier covers 180,000 vCPU-seconds and 2 million requests a month (pricing), so the API is free; Cloud SQL's smallest instance is $0.0105 an hour, about $7.67 a month, and the 10 GB of SSD storage it starts with adds $1.70 at $0.17 per GB (Cloud SQL pricing): $9.37. Keeping one instance warm at a quarter of a vCPU and 512 MiB costs about $5 at Cloud Run's idle rate, so about $14 always on. Worker pools for background processing went GA in April 2026, and IAP can put Google sign-in in front of a service (release notes).
The work is yours: IAM, the database, builds, and a domain, because Cloud Run's domain mapping is in preview and not production-ready. No previews per pull request.
5. DigitalOcean App Platform
Best for: fixed container prices with a private network between frontend and API.
A 512 MiB container is $5 a month and a development database $7, so $12 (pricing). Workers are priced like services and scheduled jobs are billed only while they run. The dev database has no backups by default; real Postgres starts at about $15. You need a payment method before creating anything, and there's no visitor password.
6. Render
Best for: backends with workers and cron on predictable per-service prices.
A Starter web service is $7 and the smallest Postgres $6 plus $0.30 per GB (pricing): $13.30. Background workers, cron jobs at a $1 monthly minimum each, and a private network between services are all there. Full-stack previews need the $25 Pro workspace, there's no built-in visitor password, and paid services have no documented scale to zero.
7. Fly.io
Best for: full-stack apps that need machines in many regions.
The smallest machine is $2.19 a month and machines can stop when idle, but Managed Postgres starts at $38 plus $0.28 per GB of storage a month (Postgres docs), so about $40 with 1 GB of data. Scheduled jobs run through Cron Manager, an app you deploy yourself (task scheduling). No free tier for new accounts, no billing alerts.
8. Cloudflare
Best for: edge-first apps that can live on Workers.
Workers Paid has a $5 minimum and includes 10 million requests a month, with no charge for bandwidth (pricing). The reference app's 30,000 requests a month are far inside the 10 million included, so Cloudflare's own bill is $5. It sells no Postgres, though; its own D1 is SQLite. You can now create a PlanetScale Postgres database and pay for it through Cloudflare, but it is PlanetScale's product, and single-node PlanetScale Postgres starts at $5 a month, so the two vendors together come to $10. Containers are generally available on Workers Paid for code that doesn't fit the Workers runtime, Cron Triggers handle schedules, and Cloudflare Access puts sign-in on staging, free for teams under 50 users.
The model is different from a container host, and a Node.js API may need changes to run as a Worker. Budget alerts only notify; there's no hard spend cap.
Where the others beat us
Workers, cron and queues are the honest dividing line. If your Vercel app uses Cron Jobs or Queues today, every other row here can carry that over and we can't yet; Railway does it for about $1 a month more than us, and kept always on it costs about $6 against our $56. Routing that lives in vercel.json is ignored here until you move the rules into code. Netlify gives each preview a copy of production data, while our branch previews share the production database until you point them elsewhere. And for a Next.js frontend that leans on Vercel's own features, App Router, Server Actions and ISR caching, which Makerkit's docs give as the reason to recommend Vercel, staying on Vercel for the frontend and moving only the API is a reasonable split.
Where we're ahead: the backend runs as the server you wrote, the database sits on the same bill, every branch gets a preview, and the staging password costs nothing on any plan, while the flat $5 plan with usage included covers all of it until real traffic arrives.
What would you have to rewrite first to leave Vercel: the routing, the cron jobs, or nothing at all?
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