Kubernetes alternatives for small teams, ranked by what you must learn first: Light Cloud, Railway and Render need nothing beyond your code, Fly.io and Coolify one new thing each, Cloud Run and ECS two, and Kamal, Docker Swarm and Nomad three or more.
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Heroku alternatives for an app that lives on review apps: Light Cloud is $5 a month with a preview of every branch included, Railway about $7.40, against $16.80 on Heroku for the same app with four review apps. Render is the closest match if you need worker dynos and a scheduler.
Julia
Free hosting for startups, ranked by the first bill: Light Cloud's is $5 a month for your own domain, Postgres and an API in any language. Cloudflare stays free longest for apps that fit in Workers but sells no Postgres, and Vercel's first bill is $20 per seat plus a database from a second vendor, because a startup counts as commercial.
Julia
Supabase alternatives for teams that use it mainly as Postgres: Light Cloud runs the database and the API for $5 a month, Firebase and Prisma land near $10, against $25 for Supabase Pro. If you rely on Supabase auth, realtime and storage, Appwrite, Nhost and Firebase are the closer matches.
Julia
Six hosts for a SaaS MVP, one vendor per row: Light Cloud is the cheapest at $5 a month with the database, branch previews and a staging password included, Railway comes to about $5.30, DigitalOcean to $12 and Render to about $13.30 with their own Postgres, and Fly.io to about $40 with its Managed Postgres. Split across two vendors, a Fly.io machine with Neon's free Postgres can be about $2.19.
Julia
Add PostgreSQL to a Node.js app on Light Cloud: create the database, connect with node-postgres using DATABASE_URL with ?sslmode=require&uselibpqcompat=true, deploy, and save a note.
Julia
Deploy Next.js 16 to Light Cloud with server rendering, no Vercel needed: pages rendered per request, prerendered pages, route handlers, static assets cached at the edge, and output: standalone for a smaller, faster-starting image.
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Render alternatives for a small app with an API and Postgres: Light Cloud is $5 a month with full-stack previews included, Railway about $5.30, against $13.30 on Render, or $38.30 once previews need the Pro workspace.
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Deploy any app to Light Cloud with your own Dockerfile: a multi-stage Rust build, EXPOSE for the port, PORT from the environment, a non-root user, and dependency layers that stay cached between deploys.
Julia