Render disk and bandwidth in 2026: $0.25 per GB of disk, $0.15 per GB of traffic

Render's pricing page splits storage and traffic into two cheap-looking unit prices that behave very differently over a year. A persistent disk is $0.25 per GB per month and it bills while it exists, whether or not anything reads it. Bandwidth is $0.15 per GB and it bills only once a workspace passes its included allowance of 5 GB on Hobby, 25 GB on Pro or 1 TB on Scale. The first is rent, the second is postage, and confusing them is how a $7 service turns into a $30 invoice.

What a gigabyte costs

Everything on this page is prorated per second, so a disk created on the 20th costs about a third of its monthly rate for that month.

What the two meters actually mean

A disk makes a service stateful, and that is a different product from a stateless web process. Render's documentation is explicit that without a disk, every file written to the local filesystem is lost on the next deploy or restart, and that only data written under the disk's mounting path survives. Disks are encrypted at rest and take automatic daily snapshots, which is part of what the $0.25 buys. The other part is that they are unavailable on Free instances, so the first gigabyte of durable state also buys the $7 compute plan.

Bandwidth works in the opposite direction: it charges for consumption, not for standing still. The Hobby workspace includes 5 GB and then bills each gigabyte at $0.15. That allowance is shared across every service in the workspace, so a static site and an API and a preview environment all draw from the same 5 GB. Static deploys are free; the traffic they serve is not.

The interaction between the two explains most surprising bills. Server-rendered pages with large images push bandwidth without touching disk. Uploads and generated PDFs push disk without touching bandwidth. A service doing both pays on two meters, and the one that grows quietly is disk, because it never shrinks when traffic drops.

How we measured it

Render's pricing page was fetched on 2026-10-25 for the per-unit rates, the included allowances and the workspace prices, and Render's persistent disks documentation was fetched the same day for the behaviour of disks and their limits. Both totals in this piece are arithmetic on those published rates, assuming 100 GB of traffic and a 100 GB disk. No service was deployed and no invoice was inspected.

What changes in practice

Upgrading to Pro to save bandwidth does not work. Pro costs $25 a month and raises the included allowance from 5 GB to 25 GB, which is worth at most $3.00 of overage, so the $22 difference is paid for the other features: unlimited seats and services, 15 custom domains, 1,000 build minutes and 14-day logs. A 100 GB month is $14.25 on Hobby and $36.25 on Pro, which is the arithmetic version of the same point (calculated 2026-10-25).

Custom domains behave like disks in miniature: they are included in ones and twos and then billed at $0.25 each per month. Hobby includes 2, Pro 15, Scale 25, and six domains on Hobby therefore adds $1.00. It is small money, but it belongs in the same column as disk rather than the same column as bandwidth, because it recurs whether or not anyone visits.

The trap worth avoiding is using a disk for data that belongs in a database. Postgres storage is $0.30 per GB per month with the first gigabyte free, and it brings backups and a query interface; a 100 GB disk costs $25 and gives you a filesystem you have to back up yourself. For relational data the managed service is cheaper per gigabyte of usable durability, and the disk is for the things a database is bad at.

Bottom line

Budget $0.25 per GB of disk per month and $0.15 per GB of traffic past the allowance, and expect a real small app with 10 GB of uploads and 50 GB of traffic to add about $9.25 to a $7 compute bill, or roughly $16.25 all in (calculated 2026-10-25).