Where to Host an AI-Built App in 2026: 15 Hosts and the Real Bill

Hosting a small AI-built app on your own domain costs from about $5 to $25 a month in November 2026, and the free tiers come with a catch. Render's free service sleeps after 15 minutes, Supabase pauses a free database after a week without use, and Vercel's free plan bans commercial use. Jobbit's Go plan hosts the app, its database and your domain for £7 a month. This guide compares 15 places on what the bill really is.

You described a booking page to an AI builder on Sunday night and by Monday it worked. Then came the questions nobody warned you about. Where does it live? Why did the first customer on Tuesday wait a minute for the page to load? Why is there a second invoice for a database? Working out where to host an AI-built app is now the hard part, because building has become the easy part. The app hosting pricing pages do not help: they are written for developers, priced in credits, compute units and gigabyte-hours, and the cheapest number on each one is rarely the number you pay.

Below: how we judged, a table of 15 hosts, the four costs that hide off the pricing page, the builders that host what they build, the hosts you export to, the commercial-use rule that catches small firms, what changed in 2026, four worked yearly sums and how to choose.

How we judged

1. Vendor pricing and documentation pages, read on 11 November 2026. Prices are in US dollars unless the vendor showed pounds, and exclude tax.
2. The plan a business would need, not the cheapest plan that exists. A free tier that forbids commercial use or sleeps is marked as such.
3. Running cost for a small app. Think a booking page, a customer list or an internal tool with a database and a few hundred visitors a week.
4. What happens at the limit. Does the app slow down, stop, or send a bigger bill?
5. Gaps are stated. Where a pricing page loaded its figures dynamically and we could not read them, the table says so.

Where to host an AI-built app: 15 options compared

Render's Starter price did not appear on the pricing page we loaded; $7 is the figure in Render's community material, and Render's own July 2026 cost article puts a Starter service plus its smallest paid Postgres at about $13 a month together.

The four hosting costs that hide off the pricing page

• Sleep. A free service that sleeps is free because it is switched off. Render's documentation says a free web service spins down after 15 minutes without traffic and takes about a minute to wake. Heroku's Eco dynos sleep after 30 minutes. For a customer-facing booking page, the first visitor of the morning waits a minute looking at a loading screen, and many will leave.
• The database. The app is the cheap part. Supabase's free plan pauses a project after one week of inactivity and its Pro plan starts at $25 a month. Render deletes a free Postgres database 30 days after creation, following a 14-day grace period. Fly.io's managed Postgres starts at $38 a month, many times the price of the machine running the app.
• Overage. Above the included allowance you pay by the gigabyte: $0.15 on Vercel, $0.09 on Supabase, $0.05 on Railway and Replit, $0.02 on Fly.io and DigitalOcean. Netlify charges 20 credits a gigabyte, roughly $0.13.
• Email. An app that sends booking confirmations needs a sending service. Resend's free tier allows 3,000 emails a month and 100 a day, then $20 a month. Render's free plan blocks the standard outgoing mail ports entirely.

Add a domain, which is yours to buy anywhere, and you have the real hosting cost: host, database, email and name. SSL certificates should cost nothing. Let's Encrypt issues them free and every host in the table that mentions SSL includes it.

Builders that host what they build

Lovable and Bolt

Lovable's documentation lists Pro from $25 a month or $250 a year and Business from $50, and says hosting is "at no cost for most smaller apps", with heavier traffic drawing on credits. Custom domains need a paid plan. If you later downgrade to Free, Lovable says a connected domain keeps serving the published app. Bolt's free plan includes hosting, a database and up to 333,000 web requests with Bolt branding; Pro at $25 a month adds a custom domain and up to 1 million requests. Bolt's help centre is direct about the limit: a free site over its allowance "stops displaying publicly until your usage resets".

Replit

Replit separates the plan from the deployment. Core is $20 a month, or $18 billed annually. On top, an Autoscale deployment has a small monthly base fee (Replit's own pages give both $1 and $2) plus $0.60 per million compute units and $0.40 per million requests, and a Reserved VM that never sleeps starts at $15 a month. Replit's pricing documentation gives its own example: a small business site with 75,000 requests comes to about $2.39 a month. Cancel the subscription and Replit warns that "published apps may go offline" and custom domain connections are removed.

Base44, Hostinger Horizons and Manus

Base44 starts at $16 a month billed annually with backend and database included and a custom domain from that plan up. Hostinger Horizons has the lowest paid price in the table at $1.99 a month, sold only as a 48-month prepayment of $95.52 that renews at $10.99 a month, and its FAQ says you can export the full source code. Manus bills hosting by usage on top of its subscription and publishes its own estimates: about $24 a month for a marketing site and about $248 for an ecommerce site, above the plan price.

Google's route deserves a warning. Firebase Studio stopped accepting new workspaces on 22 June 2026 and closes on 22 March 2027, according to Firebase's migration page, although apps already deployed keep running.

Hosts you export to

If your builder lets you take the code, you can run it elsewhere. Our guide to putting an AI-built app on your own domain covers the DNS records; this section is about the bill.

• Vercel is where v0 publishes. Pro is $20 a month per developer seat and includes $20 of usage. No database is included.
• Netlify moved to credits. Free has 300, Personal is $9 a month for 1,000 and Pro is $20 for 3,000. A production deploy costs 15 credits, so a busy week of changes can spend a free allowance before a single visitor arrives.
• Cloudflare is the cheapest serious option: 100,000 requests a day free, $5 a month paid, static files free and unlimited, and a database with a 5 GB free tier. It assumes you are comfortable with a developer's tools.
• Render is the simplest of the traditional hosts, with free TLS certificates and custom domains. Use the paid tier for anything a customer touches.
• Railway charges $5 a month on Hobby with $5 of usage included, then by the gigabyte of memory and the hour of processor.
• Fly.io has no free allowance for new accounts and waives personal bills under $5.

The commercial-use line that catches small businesses

Vercel's Hobby plan is free and it is not for you. Its fair use guidelines say: "Hobby teams are restricted to non-commercial personal use only. All commercial usage of the platform requires either a Pro or Enterprise plan." The same page defines commercial use to include "any method of requesting or processing payment from visitors" and "advertising the sale of a product or service".

A booking page for a paying business, a price list or a shop is commercial under that wording. Vercel is unusual in being explicit. The other free tiers in the table did not state a position on the pages we read, which is not the same as permission. Read the terms before a free plan carries your business.

What changed in 2026

• Replit cut its cloud prices on 1 August 2026. Autoscale compute fell from $3.20 to $0.60 per million units and requests from $1.20 to $0.40 per million.
• Netlify repriced on 14 April 2026. Bandwidth doubled from 10 to 20 credits a gigabyte and compute from 5 to 10 credits per gigabyte-hour, while requests got cheaper and forms became free.
• Vercel made flat-rate CDN pricing standard for Pro on 8 September 2026, with spike protection on by default.
• Manus moved older hosted sites to usage billing from 31 January 2026.
• A .com got dearer. Namecheap's notice puts registration at $15.98 a year and renewal at $19.98 from 1 November 2026.

Spike protection and spending caps exist because of bills that made the news. In February 2024 a Netlify user reported a $104,000 invoice after an attack on a static site, and Netlify's chief executive said publicly that it would be forgiven. The same month the team behind a product called Convoy wrote up a $23,000 Vercel bill caused by a flood of fake sign-ups. Both are the customers' accounts, not vendor statements. The lesson stands: on a usage-billed host, set the spending cap on day one. Supabase turns its cap on by default on Pro, and Bolt lets Pro users set one.

AI app hosting cost for a year: four sums for a small booking app

These use the list prices above, for one small app with a database on its own domain. The domain itself is extra in each case.

• Stay with the builder. Lovable Pro at $25 a month is $300 a year, with hosting and backend included for a small app.
• Builder plus usage. Replit Core billed annually is $216 a year. Add Replit's own example of about $2.39 a month for a small site, $28.68 a year, and the total is about $245.
• Export to a host and a managed database. Vercel Pro at $20 a month is $240 a year. Supabase Pro at $25 a month, so the database never pauses, is $300. Together, $540 a year. Render's Starter service with its smallest paid database, at about $13 a month, is about $156.
• One plan for the lot. Jobbit Go is £70 a year, or £7 a month, with hosting, a 500 MB database, a custom domain and SSL included.

The cheapest line is not always the right one. The sums assume a small app; they change quickly with traffic.

How an AI agent helps

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Manus and Meta's Muse will all write an app and explain how to deploy it. Most leave you holding a folder of code and a hosting decision. A Jobbit agent is built to finish the job:

• Builds and hosts in one place. The agent that wrote the app runs it, so there is no export step and no second account.
• One price. Go is £7 a month or £70 a year with 2,000 credits, hosting, a 500 MB database, 2 GB of disk, 100,000 requests and 1 GB of bandwidth, a custom domain and SSL. Plus is £15 a month with 1 million requests and a 4 GB database.
• Connects the domain. Buy one through the domains page or point one you own with a single DNS record.
• Sends the emails. Go includes 100 emails a day for confirmations and reminders.
• Fixes what breaks. "The booking form stopped saving phone numbers" is a message, not a support ticket to three companies.
• Brings in a person. When the app needs a designer or a developer's review, the human network takes the job with payment held in escrow.

The honest limits: Go is sized for a small app, and an app expecting heavy traffic belongs on Plus or on a developer-run host. Credits are finite. And if you already have a developer and a code repository, Cloudflare at $5 a month is hard to beat on price.

Which to choose

• You built it in Lovable, Bolt or Base44 and it works: stay, pay for the plan that allows your domain, and export a copy of the code as insurance.
• You have a developer: Cloudflare or Render, with a spending cap.
• You need a database that never pauses: pay for it. A free database that pauses after a week will fail on the Monday after a quiet holiday.
• You want it built, hosted and changed by asking: Jobbit, starting free and moving to Go when the app needs your domain.

Read next

• How to Build and Deploy a Web App With AI
• Lovable Alternatives in 2026
• How Much Does It Cost to Build an App in the UK?

Frequently asked questions

What is the cheapest way to host an AI-built app?

For a developer, Cloudflare's free tier of 100,000 requests a day, or $5 a month paid. For a non-developer who wants the app, database and domain on one bill, Jobbit Go at £7 a month. Hostinger Horizons advertises $1.99 a month, but only as a 48-month prepayment that renews at $10.99.

Can I host an AI-built app for free?

Yes, with conditions. Bolt and Lovable host small apps on their free plans on their own addresses, Render's free service sleeps after 15 minutes, and Vercel's free Hobby plan is restricted to non-commercial personal use. A free tier is fine for a test and risky for a page customers rely on.

Why does my app take a minute to load the first time?

It is probably on a free tier that sleeps. Render's documentation says a free web service spins down after 15 minutes without traffic and takes about a minute to wake. Heroku's Eco plan sleeps after 30 minutes. A paid plan that stays running removes the delay.

Is Vercel free for a business website?

No. Vercel's fair use guidelines restrict the free Hobby plan to non-commercial personal use and say all commercial usage needs Pro or Enterprise. Taking payment or advertising a product for sale counts as commercial. Pro is $20 a month per seat.

Replit or Lovable: which is cheaper to host on?

For a small app the yearly totals are close. Lovable Pro is $300 a year with hosting included for most small apps. Replit Core billed annually is $216 plus deployment usage, which Replit's own example puts at about $2.39 a month for a small site. Replit gives you more control over the server; Lovable gives you fewer decisions.

Do I need to pay separately for a database?

On builders such as Lovable, Bolt and Base44 the database is included in the plan. On general hosts such as Vercel and Netlify it is not, and a managed database starts at about $25 a month on Supabase Pro. Check this before comparing headline prices.

Can one service build and host the app on my own domain?

Yes. On Jobbit the agent builds the app, hosts it and connects your domain in one chat. The free plan gives 100 credits a day with no card for building and previewing, and Go at £7 a month keeps the app live on your own domain with a database and SSL included.