A flat, predictable home for your always-on apps
Northflank is a capable developer platform with fine-grained control over services, jobs and pipelines. Ruust takes a narrower stance: one flat price per Egg per month in GBP, egress that is never metered, and every app kept warm around the clock. If your bill jumps because your traffic did, this is the swap to make.
Flat price per Egg, in GBP · unmetered egress · no cold starts
Both let you deploy containers from a git repo, but they price and position very differently. Northflank tends towards usage and resource-based billing in USD with deep configurability. Ruust is a flat per-Egg price in GBP, unmetered egress, and no cold starts. Here is how they line up.
| Ruust | Northflank | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat price per Egg per month, in GBP. Same in every region. | Tends towards usage and resource-based billing, priced in USD. |
| Egress | Unmetered on every tier. No egress bill, ever. | Bandwidth is usually metered as part of usage-based billing. |
| Cold starts | None. Every Egg is kept warm 24/7, no scale-to-zero. | Depends on configuration; free or idle services may spin down. |
| Preset sizes | Nano £3, Small £6, Standard £12 (popular), Large £24. Or a custom slider. | Resources chosen granularly and billed by consumption. |
| Deploy flow | Connect a repo (Nixpacks or your Dockerfile), live on HTTPS in ~2 min. | Connect a repo or image; broad build and pipeline options. |
| Databases | Managed Postgres and Redis Eggs, private to your project, plus external by URL. | Managed databases and stateful workloads with fine-grained control. |
| Private networking | Eggs in a Coop reach each other privately, deny-by-default with explicit peering. | Project and service networking with detailed controls. |
| Own hardware | BYOH: run the open-source agent on your Linux boxes, £2/Egg capped £20/host. | Supports bring-your-own-cloud in various forms, usually usage-based. |
Northflank details are as we understand them and can change. Always check Northflank's current pricing and features for the latest.
What you get by switching.
Flat GBP pricing, no surprises
You pay one price per Egg per month, and it is the same in eu-west and us-east. Standard is £12 for 1GB and 0.5 vCPU. Your invoice is a line per Egg, not a meter that ticks up whenever your app gets busy. Budget for the year, not the incident.
Egress is genuinely unmetered
Every tier ships with unmetered egress. There is no bandwidth bill and no cap on volume, so a spike in traffic never becomes a spike in cost. Fair-use rate caps exist to stop abuse, but nobody is counting your gigabytes.
Always-on, no cold starts
Ruust keeps every Egg warm 24/7. There is no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag, so the first request after a quiet spell is as fast as the last. Usage-based pricing is a tax on being always-on, and we do not charge it.
Live in about two minutes
Connect a repo, pick a region and a size, and Nixpacks builds it (or bring your own Dockerfile). You get HTTPS with TLS issued in around 90 seconds and renewed automatically, plus zero-downtime rolling deploys and health checks as standard.
Where Northflank is the better fit.
Deeper platform control
Northflank is built for teams who want fine-grained control over services, jobs, pipelines and databases in one place. If you need rich build pipelines, scheduled jobs and detailed workload configuration, it usually offers more knobs than Ruust does today.
Elastic, consumption-shaped workloads
For spiky or batch workloads that idle for long stretches, resource-based billing can genuinely be cheaper, and scaling to zero is a feature, not a flaw. If your usage swings wildly, paying for what you consume may suit you better than a flat rate.
Breadth of workload types
Northflank tends to cover a broad spread of workload shapes, from long-running services to jobs and pipelines, with mature tooling around them. If your needs go well beyond always-on web apps and their databases, that breadth is a real strength.
Ruust vs Northflank, the common questions.
Is Ruust cheaper than Northflank?
It depends on your workload. Ruust is a flat price per Egg per month in GBP with unmetered egress, so for small, always-on apps with steady or bursty traffic the cost is fixed and easy to predict. For spiky workloads that idle for long stretches, Northflank's usage-based model can sometimes work out cheaper. The difference is predictability: with Ruust your bill does not move when your traffic does.
Does Ruust really not charge for egress?
Correct. Egress is unmetered on every tier, with no bandwidth bill and no cap on volume. We keep per-Egg fair-use rate caps to stop abuse, but there is no metering of how much you send. With BYOH the pipe is your own, so egress is unmetered there too.
What about cold starts?
There are none. Every Egg is kept warm 24/7 with no scale-to-zero, so requests are served without spin-up lag. This is a deliberate choice: we think usage-based pricing and cold starts are both a tax on being always-on.
Can I bring my own hardware?
Yes. With Bring Your Own Host you run the open-source, Apache-2.0 agent on your own Linux boxes. It is pull based, so Ruust never dials into your host. You pay for the panel, not the metal, at £2 per Egg capped at £20 per host, and egress stays unmetered because it is your own pipe.