Blog · 31 October 2026

What it really costs to keep a small app online in India

Most hosting prices are shown in dollars, for a plan that assumes you're a company. If you're in India with one small app, the numbers look different.

Here's an honest look at the options, including where you don't need to pay anything at all, and including ours. Prices were checked on 31 October 2026. Foreign services charge in dollars, so what you actually pay also depends on your card's exchange rate and fees.

First: what does your app need?

Your costs depend on which of these you have:

• A website made of files. Cheap, and often free.
• An app with a server. It has to run all day, so you pay for memory.
• An app with a server and saved data. You pay for the server, and for the database as well.

Then there's a name. A free address on the host's domain costs nothing. Your own .com or .in is a separate yearly cost at a domain registrar.

The options

When free is the right answer

If you have a personal site made of files, pay nothing. Free static hosting is really good. Our Website plan is cheap, but free is cheaper. You'd pay us for the convenience of doing it all from a chat or a coding agent.

Free servers suit demos too, as long as you don't mind the wait. A minute's delay is a problem for a real user, but not for your own side project.

Two free-plan limits are worth checking before you rely on one. Vercel counts things like advertising a service as commercial use, so a business site doesn't belong on Hobby. And Render's free databases expire after 30 days, so they aren't a home for data you want to keep.

Comparing like with like

The App plan's ₹119 looks far cheaper than $13, but it isn't quite the same thing, and you should know why. Toupas gives you less memory at the start.

For example, Render's Starter server is widely listed as having 512 MB of memory. Here's what that much memory costs on Toupas:

That's still fairly low, but it isn't the 90% saving the headline numbers suggest. If your app fits comfortably in 128 MB, the low price is real. If it needs more, do the sum first. Railway can also be cheap for small apps, since 128 MB at its memory rate is only about $1.25 a month; you just pay its $5 minimum.

What a year on Toupas costs

These are for one account, with prices as of the date above. The pricing page always has the current ones.

Connecting a domain doesn't include buying it; you pay the registrar for that.

Costs that don't show on any price list

• Your time. A cheap rented server can be good value if you enjoy running servers. If it takes up your weekends, it isn't cheap.
• Bills that change. Usage-based pricing is fair, but a burst of traffic can change your bill. Check whether your host lets you set a limit.
• Paying from India. Some foreign services want an international card, and recurring charges on Indian cards can run into extra approval rules. Toupas takes cards and UPI, through Razorpay, and prices in rupees.
• Backups. Check what's included before you rely on it. Toupas includes nightly backups of app databases, but keep your own copy of anything you can't afford to lose.

What we'd do

1. Start with whatever's free, and put your idea in front of people.
2. Pay only when it matters: when the app needs to stay awake, keep real data or carry your business's name.
3. Choose by what your app needs and how much hosting you want to learn, not the headline price.

If you'd rather not learn it at all, every new Toupas app gets 30 free days with no card, so you can see if it fits before paying anything.