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Independent notes on AI computeChecked daily / 2026.09.27
buildai/current

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Fly.io free trial: 2 machine hours or 7 days

creditsserverlessfly-io

A platform that runs your apps as Fly Machines, lightweight VMs started close to users, billed by machine runtime. Official site

Fly.io free trial, the facts

Official pricing

Amount2 machine hours or 7 days
Grant typeTime-limited free trial
Expiry2 hours of machine runtime or 7 days of access, whichever comes first
Payment method requiredNo
Withdrawable as cashNo
What I ran on itNot tested yet

Filed under: Serverless free tiers and creditsFree credits with no card required

Good for

  • A quick taste of Fly Machines: deploy, test, tear down within 2 VM hours
  • Trying the platform without a card, briefly

Not for

  • Keeping anything running: 2 total machine hours is a demo, not a tier
  • Evaluating slowly while a card is on file: adding a card ends the trial

Fly.io’s trial is “2 hours of machine runtime or 7 days of access, whichever comes first.” No card is needed to start. There is no dollar credit: the grant is measured in machine hours and calendar days. And the sharpest rule in the docs is this: adding a payment card ends the trial and billing starts. Trial and pricing pages rechecked on 2026-08-29; the discontinued-plans page was last checked 2026-08-21.

Correction: the old free allowances are gone

If you have read that Fly.io gives everyone 3 shared-cpu VMs free, or a $5 Hobby credit, that is historical. The legacy free allowances and the $5 Hobby plan credit were discontinued for new signups when those plans were deprecated on 2024-10-07, per Fly’s discontinued-plans page. As of the checks above, the only free thing a new account gets is this short trial.

What the trial includes

Two total VM hours across the account, machines that auto-stop after 5 minutes, a maximum of 10 machines, 20 GB of volume storage, and machines up to 2 vCPUs with 4 GB of memory. Dedicated IPv4 addresses and performance vCPUs are excluded. Two hours is enough to deploy an app, click around, and read logs. It is not an evaluation period in any extended sense.

The card rule, stated twice because it matters

On most platforms adding a card is a formality. On Fly.io it is the off switch: add a card and the trial ends immediately, with billing live from that point. If you want to stay in the free window, do not add a card until you have decided.

On GPUs

Fly’s GPU documentation URLs returned 404 on 2026-08-21, and neither the pricing page nor the trial page advertises GPU machines. I am not publishing GPU claims or deprecation dates without a live official URL.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. This page reports only what the official pages state.

For trials with more room, the Railway free trial gives $5 over 30 days, and the Render free tier is a recurring monthly allowance rather than a one-shot. For the bigger picture, read how to choose compute. Every grant I track is on the credits index.

Fly.io, common questions

Does Fly.io still have a free tier?

Not for new signups. The legacy free allowances and the $5 Hobby plan credit were discontinued when those plans were deprecated on 2024-10-07, per the official discontinued-plans page. What a new account gets today is a short trial instead: 2 hours of machine runtime or 7 days of access, whichever comes first, with no card needed to start. Adding a payment card ends the trial and billing begins.

What changed here

  1. New entry

    Added Fly.io: 2 machine hours or 7 days.

Plus 1 recheck that found nothing changed. Every row links to the full record on the changelog, with the official page it was checked against.

Related entries

Sources

Last checked:

All numbers on this page come from the official pages above, checked on the date shown. If a figure is not stated there, this page says "Not stated officially" instead of guessing.