A few weeks ago I went down a rabbit hole reading about people who got wrecked by their hosting bill for a project that was supposed to be "free tier, no worries."
Two stories stuck with me:
A developer got hit with a $104,000 bill from Netlify for a simple static site after a traffic spike. He only got it waived after the story went viral on Hacker News.
A Vercel user's staging environment got scraped by bots over a weekend, and a $20/month plan turned into a $23,000 bill.
What got me wasn't that these platforms are evil — it's that "Spend Management" and "usage limit" features exist on most of them, but they're opt-in, buried in settings, and there are real reports of the alerts just... not firing when they should.
So before my next side project, I wanted a boring, honest answer to one question: *if this thing actually got traffic, what would it cost me on Netlify vs. Vercel vs. Railway vs. Render vs. Cloudflare Pages?
*
Reading five pricing pages and doing napkin math every time I evaluate a platform got old fast. So I built DeployRadar — a free calculator that takes a few inputs (expected monthly visitors, average page weight, build minutes, whether you're using serverless/edge functions and how often) and estimates a rough monthly cost across all five platforms side by side, sorted cheapest to most expensive.
A few decisions I made on purpose
No account access, no signup, no OAuth. It doesn't need to read your actual usage to be useful — it's a before you deploy tool, not a monitoring tool. You type in your estimate, it does the math against each platform's publicly published pricing rules, and that's it. Nothing to authorize, nothing to connect, nothing to leak.
It's not trying to be precise, it's trying to be directionally honest. The site is upfront that these are rough estimates based on public pricing pages, not a quote — real bills depend on plan specifics, regional pricing, and provider-specific overage rules that change over time. The goal is "oh, Railway would clearly be 3x cheaper for this shape of traffic" not "your bill will be exactly $47.32."
I shipped the smallest possible version first. No dashboard, no database, no user accounts — just a static page with client-side JS doing the pricing math. The whole thing is one HTML file. If people want more (the obvious next step being: connect your actual account read-only and warn you before you go over budget, instead of just estimating ahead of time), there's a spot on the page to say so. I'd rather build that because people asked for it than guess.
Try it deployradar.netlify.app — takes about 15 seconds to get a comparison.
If you've been burned by a surprise hosting bill (or dodged one), I'd genuinely like to hear the story — and if there's a platform I should add, or a pricing rule I got wrong, tell me. I'm actively updating the pricing rules as providers change their tiers.
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