For the past two weeks, I have been working on a small app of mine: Robin Talks, an AI agent that talks to you, helps you improve your English speaking skill by role-playing in typical scenarios like ordering coffee, asking for directions, etc. During the final stretch, I wanted to try out different platform-as-a-service (PaaS). I have hosted two projects on Vercel already, so I am trying out a different one out of curiosity. I picked out 3 PaaS to try setting up my backend:
- Cloudflare
- Wasmer.io
- Render
It is a simple Hono backend, with my app built in React Native.
Cloudflare
It was a bit of a pain to set up, because you have to create wrangler.jsonc. And since Cloudflare errored every time I tried getting it to write the config, here is a sample one to make things easier:
{
"$schema": "./node_modules/wrangler/config-schema.json",
"name": "robin-talks",
"main": "dist/index.js",
"compatibility_date": "2026-10-10",
"tsconfig": "./tsconfig.json"
}It seemed that Cloudflare favored your configuration being on your wrangler file, because it kept popping up tips on storing key-value to that file anytime I tried changing anything.
After setting up the worker, I quickly found out that the Free plan is very limited. 10ms CPU time is not enough for anything, even just reading from a database. I don't know why, maybe using Drizzle ORM had some effect on that. So I didn't go with this vendor, though I still host my landing page on it. Their CDNs are impeccable.
Wasmer.io
Anytime I search for "Free PHP hosting" (yes, it exists for who knows why), this popped up. So they got me hooked for a long time. This time, I bit my bullet and deployed on their infrastructure. And, unlike other services, they deserved the free title, since it was even a few grade below Cloudflare. Their offer is generous, but their compute is slow, and CPU time jumped up real fast, despite all the calls being health checks. There is only basic logging, no tracing, no re-deploy option. No monorepo means I had to separate my backend to its own repo, and rewrite it to be a node server (wrapped around Hono). I would leave it for free PHP hosting, assuming I would be bothered to write a Laravel app.
Vercel
Best experience so far. That goes without saying, since they made Turborepo. Vercel picked it up, immediately realized I was deploying the backend and set everything up easy peasy. Bad thing is they only allow one GitHub account, so I had to fork my project to my other account hosting Papersy and JobbedIn.
Render
The one I tested last. Full 750 hours free with 0.1 CPU, but somehow ran faster than Wasmer.io. Problem is that the worker shuts down after 15 minutes of inactivity. But they allow deploying public repos, which is much better than Vercel IMO. Render also recognizes Turborepo and works with it. Overall, similar to Vercel in terms of polished.