Fly.io vs Scaleway

Fly-io and Scaleway offer fundamentally different approaches to managed database hosting. Fly-io positions itself as a lightweight, container-native platform, with pricing starting at $1.94/mo and topping out at $131.80/mo. In this ecosystem, you are capped at 16 GB of RAM and 160 GB of disk storage, which is sufficient for most microservices but restrictive for large-scale data warehousing. Scaleway, by comparison, operates more like a traditional cloud provider, offering a massive spectrum from $0.10/mo up to $1861.50/mo. Their high-end tiers push up to 256 GB of RAM and 48 vCPU cores, putting them in direct competition with heavy-duty instances on AWS or GCP.

• Scaleway mandates a standard 20 GB disk allocation across most tiers, while Fly-io provides a more variable storage footprint that starts as low as 1 GB.
• Storage overages are cheaper on Scaleway at $0.12/GB, whereas Fly-io charges a slightly higher $0.15/GB for additional disk space.
• Bandwidth costs for egress are lower on Scaleway at $0.01/GB, compared to the $0.02/GB fee applied to egress traffic on Fly-io.
• Memory density on Scaleway is significantly higher, allowing for massive read-heavy workloads that would be impossible to fit within the 16 GB limit of a standard Fly-io instance.

Fly-io is built for developers who need to keep their database close to their application logic within the same private network, trading off raw hardware ceiling for architectural simplicity. Scaleway provides the necessary infrastructure for production environments that require high-availability replication and massive memory buffers for complex query execution. If your workload requires sustained performance on large datasets, the cost-per-GB efficiency of Scaleway’s storage and egress makes it the more predictable choice for long-term growth. Opting for Fly-io usually involves accepting higher bandwidth and storage penalties in exchange for lower barrier-to-entry configuration.