A Render alternative with flat, predictable pricing and unmetered egress
Render is a capable place to run web services, static sites and managed Postgres. Ruust takes a different bet: one flat price per Egg per month in GBP, egress that is never metered, and apps that stay warm around the clock. If you run lots of small, always-on services, the maths tends to land in your favour.
Flat price per Egg, in GBP · unmetered egress · no cold starts
Both platforms deploy a git repo to HTTPS in minutes with managed Postgres alongside. The difference is the billing philosophy: Render usually charges per instance plus metered bandwidth, whilst Ruust charges one flat GBP price per Egg with unmetered egress and no cold starts.
| Ruust | Render | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat price per Egg, per month, in GBP. No per-minute meter. | Instance-based monthly pricing per service, priced in USD. |
| Egress | Unmetered on every tier. No egress bill, ever. | Tends to meter bandwidth beyond an included allowance. |
| Cold starts | Every Egg kept warm 24/7. No scale-to-zero, no spin-up lag. | Free tier usually spins services down after inactivity. |
| Preset sizes | Nano £3, Small £6, Standard £12, Large £24. Same price in every region. | Instance types priced in USD; add-ons billed separately. |
| Custom sizing | Slider at £12/vCPU + £6/GB; memory and vCPU scale independently. | Pick from fixed instance plans per service. |
| Databases | Managed Postgres and Redis Eggs with a persistent volume, private to your project. | Managed Postgres available; instance and storage billed separately. |
| Private networking | Eggs in a Coop reach each other by hostname, deny-by-default with explicit peering. | Private networking between services within your account. |
| Own hardware | BYOH: run the open-source agent on your Linux boxes, pull-based, £2/Egg capped £20/host. | Runs on Render's managed infrastructure only. |
Render details are as we understand them and can change. Always check Render's current pricing and features for the latest.
What you get by switching.
One price, no meter running
Ruust bills a flat GBP amount per Egg per month, and that is the whole bill. There is no per-minute compute meter and no bandwidth counter ticking in the background, so the invoice looks the same whether your app has a quiet week or a busy one.
Unmetered egress on every tier
Egress is never metered on Ruust, on any size, in any region. A traffic spike or a chunky download endpoint will not produce a surprise line item. Fair-use rate caps exist to stop abuse, but there is no cap on the volume you serve.
Always-on, no cold starts
Every Egg stays warm 24/7. There is no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag, so the first request after a quiet spell is as quick as the last. That matters most for small always-on apps, webhooks and side projects that would otherwise sleep.
Deploy in about two minutes
Connect a repo (Nixpacks autobuild or your own Dockerfile), pick a region and size, and you are live on HTTPS in roughly two minutes with TLS issued in about 90 seconds and renewed automatically. Zero-downtime rolling deploys, health checks and replicas come as standard.
Where Render is the better fit.
A broad, mature platform
Render covers a wide surface: web services, static sites, background workers, cron jobs and managed Postgres under one roof, with a polished dashboard and a large, established community. If you want a single well-trodden home for several different workload types, it is a strong and dependable choice.
Usage-based can suit spiky, bursty traffic
If your workloads are genuinely intermittent, or you lean on the free tier for hobby projects that can tolerate spinning down, paying only for what you use can work out well. Ruust's always-on flat model is aimed at the opposite shape, so honestly assess your traffic first.
Deep autoscaling and managed extras
Render's autoscaling and its catalogue of managed add-ons and integrations are mature and battle-tested. For teams that want horizontal autoscaling tuned automatically to load, plus a rich ecosystem of one-click services, that depth is a genuine advantage.
Ruust vs Render, the common questions.
Is Ruust cheaper than Render?
It depends on your traffic shape, but Ruust is designed to be more predictable. You pay one flat GBP price per Egg with unmetered egress, so there is no per-minute compute meter or bandwidth allowance to blow through. For many small, always-on apps that serve real traffic, a fixed monthly figure usually beats usage-based billing plus metered egress.
Does Ruust have cold starts like Render's free tier?
No. Every Egg on Ruust is kept warm 24/7 with no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag. Render's free tier usually spins services down after inactivity, which means a cold start on the next request. On Ruust the first request after a quiet period is as fast as any other.
What happens if my app suddenly gets a lot of traffic?
Your egress stays unmetered, so a spike does not create a surprise bandwidth bill. Compute is bounded by the size of your Egg, and you can scale up with the slider or add replicas for horizontal scaling. Per-Egg fair-use rate caps exist only to curb abuse, not to meter normal traffic.
Can I bring my own database or servers?
Yes to both. You can run managed Postgres and Redis database Eggs, or connect any external Postgres or MySQL by connection string. With Bring Your Own Host you run the open-source Apache-2.0 agent on your own Linux boxes (pull-based, Ruust never dials your host) and pay for the panel not the metal, at £2 per Egg capped at £20 per host, with egress unmetered because it is your own pipe.