Author
Diego pulls apart cloud and infrastructure invoices line by line so you can see where the money actually goes before the bill lands.
WorkOS pricing in 2026 is free for authentication up to 1 million monthly active users, then $2,500 per additional 1M. The real cost is enterprise features: SSO and Directory Sync (SCIM) run $125 per connection per month each, dropping to $50 at scale. Your WorkOS bill is driven by how many enterprise customers you have, not how many users.
PlanetScale killed its free tier, so what does it really cost in 2026? A numbers-first teardown: the full price ladder, a worked monthly bill for a small production app, and the exact usage point where a cheaper database like Neon wins.
Fly.io pricing in 2026 is pure pay-as-you-go: you pay per second for the Machines (micro-VMs) you actually run, not a fixed plan. A small always-on app on a shared-cpu-1x 256MB Machine costs about $2.02 a month; a two-Machine production SaaS with Postgres and Redis lands near $29 a month; a three-region app on performance Machines runs about $226 a month. The old Hobby, Launch, and Scale plan names were retired in the October 2024 pay-as-you-go switch, and the biggest lever left is a machine reservation, which cuts committed compute by 40%.
Mux bills video in three meters, not one plan price. Here is the real 2026 arithmetic: worked 30-day bills for three app sizes, the resolution multiplier that quietly quadruples costs, and four levers that lower the bill.
As of July 2026, Algolia uses usage-based pricing with no flat subscription on its self-serve plans: a free Build tier (10K searches and 1M records a month), then Grow at $0.50 per 1,000 search requests and $0.40 per 1,000 records past the free allowance. Because search requests dominate at scale, the same store can cost $0 on the free tier, about $226 a month while growing, or roughly $1,655 a month at high traffic. Your bill is driven by search volume and replica count, not by raw data size.
As of July 2026, SendGrid no longer has a permanent free plan: the floor is a 60-day trial then Essentials at $19.95/mo (50,000 emails). Pro starts at $89.95/mo (100,000 emails plus one dedicated IP). Your real bill is the base price plus per-email overage ($0.0013 on the 50K plan, $0.0009 on 100K, $0.0011 on entry Pro). A 10K/mo sender pays a flat $19.95; 200K/mo on Pro runs about $199.95 if you eat overage.
Neon bills Postgres by the CU-hour with scale-to-zero. Here is the 2026 rate card, the always-on trap that 5x-es your bill, three worked 30-day bills, and the crossover versus a fixed instance.
Cloudinary pricing in 2026 runs on credits: 1 credit equals 1,000 transformations, 1 GB of managed storage, or 1 GB of net delivery bandwidth. Free gives 25 credits, Plus is $99/mo ($89 annual) for 225 credits, and Advanced is $249/mo ($224 annual) for 600 credits. Because credits are one shared pool, delivery bandwidth is usually the line that runs out first, and it works out to roughly $0.40 per GB, far above a raw CDN.
As of July 2026, Lovable costs $0 (Free, 5 build credits/day up to 30 a month), $25/month (Pro, 100 credits), or $50/month (Business, the same 100 credits plus SSO and governance); Enterprise is volume-based. A credit buys a variable amount of work: 0.50 to 1.70 credits per action in Default Mode, or 1 credit per message in Plan Mode. That puts the effective rate around $0.25 per credit on Pro and $0.50 on Business. Budget by credits-per-feature, not the sticker.
Resend pricing in 2026 runs from a permanent Free tier (3,000 emails per month, capped at 100 per day) to Pro at $20 per month for 50,000 emails or $35 for 100,000, then Scale from $90 up to $1,150 per month for 2.5 million emails, with $0.90 per 1,000 overage. The catch the pricing page hides: your real cost is the effective price per 1,000 emails, which swings from $0.40 to $3.33 on the same $20 plan depending on how full your tier is. Budget by the tier you actually fill, and watch the separate marketing-contacts meter.
The 2026 Claude API rate card is the floor. Your output-to-input ratio decides the bill. Here it is as a real 30-day bill across three workloads, plus the three levers that cut it.
Clerk's Free plan covers 50,000 monthly retained users (MRU) in 2026, so most side projects and early-stage SaaS pay $0. Pro is $25/month with 50,000 MRU included, then $0.02 per user in the 50,001 to 100,000 band. The bill that surprises teams is not per-user overage; it is the feature add-ons, B2B Auth at $100/month, Administration at $100/month, and extra Enterprise SSO connections at $75/month each. Clerk also bills retained users, not signups, so anyone who does not return 24 hours after signing up costs nothing.
