Head-to-head, indicative as of Oct 2026. Prices change — always confirm on the vendor page.
Quick read: pick AWS Lambda if your workload is event-driven pipelines inside the aws ecosystem and its pricing model fits your traffic shape; pick Fly.io if you need apps that need to be close to users everywhere. For anything latency-sensitive at the edge, cold start row is the tiebreaker.
| AWS Lambda | Fly.io | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Function-as-a-Service | Global VM platform |
| Free tier | 1M requests/month (always free) | Small allowances on paid plan |
| Paid pricing (indicative) | ~$0.20 per million requests + GB-seconds compute | Pay-as-you-go from ~$2/mo per VM |
| Egress | ~$0.09/GB (billed) | Free tier then billed |
| Cold start | ~100ms-1s (varies by runtime/VPC) | ~300ms (Firecracker VMs) |
| Regions | ~30+ regions | 30+ regions |
| Best for | Event-driven pipelines inside the AWS ecosystem | Apps that need to be close to users everywhere |
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Last reviewed 2026-10-02 · NinjaOps SEO grid · DevOps blog