Head-to-head, indicative as of Oct 2026. Prices change — always confirm on the vendor page.
Quick read: pick Northflank if your workload is teams shipping many small services and databases and its included egress fits your traffic shape; pick AWS App Runner if you need containers on aws without touching ecs/eks. For anything latency-sensitive at the edge, cold start row is the tiebreaker.
| Northflank | AWS App Runner | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Deployment platform (containers + DBs) | Container PaaS |
| Free tier | Free tier with 2 services | None |
| Paid pricing (indicative) | Usage-based from ~$0 | vCPU + memory per second, scale to zero |
| Egress | Included | Metered |
| Cold start | N/A (persistent) | Seconds from zero |
| Regions | Multi-region | AWS regions |
| Best for | Teams shipping many small services and databases | Containers on AWS without touching ECS/EKS |
Try Northflank Try AWS App Runner
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