Cheapest cloud VPS and hosting for AI agents
Most agents need a small always-on process, a cron or webhook endpoint, and a database. A $5/month VPS gives full control; a platform free tier removes server work but adds limits. The table puts both side by side with the prices and limits we verified.
Prices verified on vendor pages for 9 of 9 providers below; the rest are marked unknown. Always confirm at checkout. Order: vendor discounts, then free tiers, then standard signups, A–Z. Affiliate status does not affect order.
Comparison table
| Provider | Offer | Published pricing (verified) | Free option |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Free tier | Workers Free: 100,000 requests/day; 10 ms CPU time per invocation; no card required to start | Yes |
| Fly.io | Free tier | New orgs: free trial up to 2 hours Machine runtime or 7 days (whichever first); no card to start; no ongoing free tier after trial | Yes |
| GitHub | Free tier | GitHub Free personal accounts: 120 hrs compute + 15 GB-month storage/mo included for Codespaces | Yes |
| Railway | Free tier | $5 one-time trial (30 days), then Free plan $1 credit/mo (no rollover) | Yes |
| Render | Free tier | Free compute plans for web services, Key Value, and Postgres (limits apply); Hobby workspace $0/mo + compute; static sites always free | Yes |
| Vercel | Free tier | Hobby $0/mo for personal/non-commercial use; usage caps (cannot buy overages on Hobby) | Yes |
| 99Stack Cloud | Standard signup | Examples (per 99stack.com product pages): SSD VPS Shared Small 1 vCPU/512 MB/10 GiB from $0.0068/hr ($5/mo); NVIDIA H100 (12 vCPU/240 GB RAM) $2.8767/hr ($2,100/mo). | Not verified |
| SoftShellWeb | Standard signup | Store prices (USD/mo): EU KVM VPS from $5 (1 core/1GB/20GB) to $98 (8 core/32GB); USA KVM SSD VPS from $5 (1GB) to $160 (32GB); Shared Basic $5 (20GB, 10 domains) (per softshellweb.com/client/store). | Not verified |
| xCloud | Standard signup | Pricing per xcloud.host/pricing: managed hosting (they provision, patch and run the server; WordPress, Node.js, Laravel, Docker, Next.js) from $5/mo, sized by memory (e.g. Cloudflare Enterprise CDN $5/domain/mo, Mail Delivery $3/mo for 3,000 emails with a 100/mo free tier). | Yes |
Pros and cons
Derived only from facts on the vendor pages we checked.
Cloudflare
Pros:
- Free plan, trial or credits to test before paying
- No card required to start (per vendor page)
- Pricing is published, so you can budget before signing up
Cons:
- Some plans or trials require a card
Fly.io
Pros:
- Free plan, trial or credits to test before paying
- No card required to start (per vendor page)
- Pricing is published, so you can budget before signing up
Cons:
- Limits and overage rates vary by plan; read them before committing
GitHub
Pros:
- Free plan, trial or credits to test before paying
- Pricing is published, so you can budget before signing up
Cons:
- Limits and overage rates vary by plan; read them before committing
Railway
Pros:
- Free plan, trial or credits to test before paying
- Pricing is published, so you can budget before signing up
Cons:
- Part of the offer is one-time or intro-only; check the ongoing price
Render
Pros:
- Free plan, trial or credits to test before paying
- Pricing is published, so you can budget before signing up
Cons:
- Requires an application; approval is not guaranteed
Vercel
Pros:
- Free plan, trial or credits to test before paying
- Pricing is published, so you can budget before signing up
Cons:
- Free tier is for personal / non-commercial use
99Stack Cloud
Pros:
- Usage-based billing, so idle months cost little or nothing
- Pricing is published, so you can budget before signing up
Cons:
- Limits and overage rates vary by plan; read them before committing
SoftShellWeb
Pros:
- Pricing is published, so you can budget before signing up
Cons:
- Limits and overage rates vary by plan; read them before committing
xCloud
Pros:
- Free plan, trial or credits to test before paying
- Pricing is published, so you can budget before signing up
Cons:
- Limits and overage rates vary by plan; read them before committing
How to choose
- Long-running agents (polling loops, websockets, browsers) need a VPS or container host; request/response agents fit serverless free tiers.
- Check whether the free tier sleeps on idle; a sleeping agent misses scheduled work.
- Check commercial-use terms: some hobby tiers forbid business use.
- Budget RAM first. Headless browsers and local models need far more memory than the cheapest VPS plan.
FAQ
What is the cheapest way to host an AI agent?
For light request/response agents, a free serverless tier. For always-on agents, the cheapest verified VPS plans in the table start around the prices shown.
Can I run a headless browser on a $5 VPS?
Often only one at a time, and memory is tight. A hosted browser API may be cheaper than a larger VPS.
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