Fly.io vs Axiom
Run your app close to users, globally
vs. Observability for logs, traces, events — serverless-first, infinite scale
Pricing tiers
Fly.io
Pay-as-you-go
No monthly fee. Machines billed per second. Free allocations: ~3 small shared machines + 3 GB volumes.
$0 base (usage-based)
Shared CPU 1x — 256 MB
Entry VM. 1 shared vCPU, 256 MB RAM. ~$2.02/month continuously on.
$2/mo
Performance 1x — 2 GB
Dedicated 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM.
$32/mo
Reservation — Shared (1 yr)
$36/year for $5/mo credit (40% savings).
$36/mo
Shared CPU 8x — 16 GB
8 shared vCPU, 16 GB RAM.
$89/mo
Performance 16x — 128 GB
Dedicated 16 vCPU, 128 GB RAM.
$1014/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Dedicated capacity, SLA.
Custom
Axiom
Personal (Free)
No credit card. 500 GB/month ingest, 10 GB-hr compute, 25 GB storage, 30-day retention max.
Free
Axiom Cloud
$25/month minimum platform fee. Volume-based ingest + query credits. Always-free allowances: 1 TB/mo ingest, 100 GB-hr queries, 100 GB storage.
$25/mo
RBAC Add-on
+$50/month for role-based access control.
$50/mo
Audit Logs Add-on
+$50/month for audit logs.
$50/mo
Directory Sync Add-on
+$100/month for SCIM.
$100/mo
SSO Add-on
+$100/month for SAML SSO.
$100/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Dedicated cluster option, private connectivity, SLA.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing pay-as-you-go on Fly.io vs personal on Axiom.
| Metric | Fly.io | Axiom |
|---|---|---|
| ingest gb month | — | 500 GB/month |
| query compute gb hr | — | 10 GB-hr/month |
| retention max days | — | 30 days |
| storage gb | — | 25 GB |
Features
Fly.io · 14 features
- Auto Stop/Start — Machines auto-stop when idle, start on request (like scale-to-zero).
- Certs — Let's Encrypt + wildcard certs managed.
- Fly GPU — A100/L40S/A10 on-demand GPU machines.
- Fly Kubernetes (FKS) — Managed Kubernetes on Fly machines.
- Fly Machines — Firecracker microVMs. Start in <1s. Run any Docker image.
- Fly Postgres — Managed Postgres via Supabase partnership (2024). Also legacy self-run Postgres …
- fly-replay headers — Route request to another region at app level.
- Fly Volumes — Persistent SSD attached to a Machine. Encrypted at rest.
- Global Anycast — Single IP routes to the closest region automatically.
- LiteFS — Distributed SQLite with primary/replica across regions.
- Private Networks — 6PN WireGuard mesh. Connect machines across regions privately.
- Secrets — Encrypted env vars propagated to all regions.
- Tigris (partner) — S3-compatible storage for Fly apps. By partner.
- Upstash Redis (partner) — Managed Redis via Upstash.
Axiom · 15 features
- API Tokens — Scoped tokens for ingest or query.
- APL (query language) — Axiom Processing Language — Kusto-inspired pipes (`|`). Fast + expressive.
- AWS Lambda Extension — Native extension to ship Lambda logs + traces.
- Cloudflare Integration — Workers + Pages log drain. Log pull from any Cloudflare zone.
- Dashboards — Visualizations from APL queries: line/bar/pie/heatmap/table.
- Datasets — Logical partitions of data. Schema-free; fields auto-indexed.
- Elastic Bulk API compat — Elasticsearch Bulk API endpoint — drop-in replacement.
- Field Explorer — Auto-detected field stats, histograms, top-values per dataset.
- Monitors (alerts) — Threshold + anomaly-based alerting on APL queries. Route to Slack/PagerDuty/emai…
- next-axiom — Next.js logger with automatic correlation + Web Vitals capture.
- OpenTelemetry-native — Ingest OTLP/HTTP + gRPC. No proprietary agent.
- Saved Queries — Save + share APL queries as starters.
- Stream (live tail) — Live tail of incoming events with filter bar.
- Traces — OpenTelemetry-native. Distributed tracing across services.
- Vercel Integration — One-click: Vercel logs + Web Vitals → Axiom.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Fly.io | Axiom |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | flyctl CLI | Axiom CLI |
| SDK | — | axiom-go, @axiomhq/js, axiom-py, axiom-rs, next-axiom |
| REST | Machines API | Axiom REST API, Ingest HTTP endpoint |
| GRAPHQL | Fly GraphQL API | — |
| MCP | — | Axiom MCP |
| OTHER | Fly Postgres (wire) | — |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Fly.io and Axiom are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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