What changed
Fly.io's revised pricing took effect October 1, 2026. Machine RAM now costs $6 per GB-month in base regions, up from roughly $5, while Machine CPU prices are unchanged. Bundled Machine presets therefore increase by less than 20% overall, with larger percentage effects on memory-heavy configurations. Separately, Fly cut Sprite CPU charges approximately 45% and Sprite memory charges 50%. Its effective-date price sheet lists Sprite CPU at $0.03825 per cumulative CPU-hour and memory at $0.021875 per GB-hour of actual use. Current public pricing rounds the CPU figure to $0.0385. Managed Postgres monthly cluster plans, volume storage, snapshot rates and network egress are not described as changing in this update.
Why it matters
For solo developers and small SaaS operators, the same provider now rewards different operating patterns. A continuously running RAM-heavy web app or self-managed PostgreSQL Machine has a higher baseline bill, while intermittent agent sandboxes and development sessions on Sprites can become substantially cheaper because compute and hot storage are charged only while awake. Teams should forecast provisioned RAM and replicas rather than assuming every Machine bill rose 20%; the precise impact depends on memory share, machine count, region and uptime. A 2-vCPU/4-GB Sprite running fully loaded for 720 hours is Fly's illustrative $118.08 monthly bill, down from $226.80, but that is a vendor scenario rather than a promise for real applications.
A 20% RAM-rate increase is not a 20% Machine bill increase
Fly's rate for Machine RAM rose from about $5 to $6 per GB-month, while CPU charges stayed flat. At base-region list rates, a shared-cpu-1x 256MB preset is now $2.19 per month and a performance-1x 2GB preset is $33.00. Independent price comparisons estimate increases of roughly 13% and 6.5% for those two presets respectively, with RAM-heavy custom configurations closer to the full 20% memory-rate rise. Regions and month lengths affect actual totals.
Sprites get a different economic treatment
Sprites are metered for cumulative CPU time and actual memory time rather than a standing CPU/RAM reservation. Fly lists $0.03825 per CPU-hour and $0.021875 per GB-hour in the October effective-date schedule, compared with an approximately 45% and 50% reduction from the prior rates. Hot storage bills while awake and persistent cold storage continues until deletion. The vendor's 2-vCPU/4-GB, 720-hour example falls from $226.80 to $118.08, with lower totals for idle or short-lived sessions.
Other bills do not disappear
Machine volumes still bill for provisioned space at $0.15/GB-month, snapshots at $0.08/GB-month after the first 10GB free, and dedicated IPv4 at $2/month. Public egress starts at $0.02/GB in North America and Europe and is higher in other regions. Managed Postgres starts at $38/month for the Basic cluster plus storage. Those meters need their own forecast even when compute becomes cheaper.
Migration and forecasting caveats
Do not assume that a Sprite can replace an always-on Machine: execution lifecycle, storage, networking and operational guarantees differ. The October update page does not explicitly spell out grandfathering or every account's invoice timing. Fly's live pricing page rounds the Sprite CPU rate slightly differently from the dated change page, so use the current billing calculator and actual region before committing budgets.