Fly Machines vs Shuttle
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Fly Machines and Shuttle.
Quick Verdict
3.9/5
Fly Machines
0 reviews
3.4/5
Shuttle
0 reviews
Fly Machines is rated higher (3.9 vs 3.4). Fly Machines are Fly.io's fast-starting virtual machines for containerised workloads. Start in 300ms, stop when idle to save costs. Used for auto-scaling web services and ephemeral compute. Shuttle deploys Rust backend services with zero configuration — annotate your code with macros and Shuttle handles the infrastructure. No YAML, no Terraform. Pay-per-use serverless Rust.
Fly Machines Fast-starting VMs for containerised apps at the edge | Shuttle Deploy Rust backends from your code — no config | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.9 (0 reviews)✓ | 3.4 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | usage-based | freemium |
| Starting price | From $2.19/mo | Free tier available✓ |
| Best for | Developers who want fast-starting containers that scale to zero between requests at the edge, and teams building custom control planes on a VM-per-container API | Rust developers — solo or small teams — who want a backend live in minutes from annotated code and can accept a London-only region and no contractual uptime guarantee. |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | — | 0 vCPU |
| RAM | — | 1 GB |
| Storage | — | 1 GB |
| Bandwidth | — | — |
| SLA uptime | 99.9% | — |
| Data-center count | 17✓ | 1 |
| €/GB RAM/mo | — | €0.00 |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ✓ | |
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ✓ | |
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | Netherlands, Sweden, France, Germany, UK, US, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, Singapore, Australia | AWS eu-west-2 (London) |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tiermanaged optioneu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter | free tieropen sourceus datacenter |
| Visit Fly Machines → | Visit Shuttle → | |
Fly Machines
Pros
- + ~300ms VM boot with automatic stop when idle — real scale-to-zero economics for request-driven workloads
- + Billed by the second with a fully published rate card; smallest Machine $2.19/30 days running
- + Low-level lifecycle control via REST API: create, start, stop, clone, update, destroy per VM
- + 17 regions on Fly's own hardware with per-Machine region placement
- + Fast restart from stopped state — assembled rootfs stays on the worker host
Cons
- - Fly.io-only API and infrastructure — no orchestration portability
- - Running the raw API means building your own scaling, placement retry and health logic
- - Always-on and idle costs accumulate: stopped rootfs $0.15/GB/month, volumes $0.15/GB/month, dedicated IPv4 $2/month
- - Capacity limits per region and host can make Machine placement fail
- - No free tier — only a 2-VM-hour/7-day trial — and no uptime SLA outside Enterprise plans
Shuttle
Pros
- + Infrastructure from code annotations: databases, secrets and static assets provisioned from function signatures, no YAML or Terraform
- + Real free tier (0.25 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM, 0.5 GB database, 100 build minutes/month) with custom domain support
- + Published, itemized usage rates ($0.12/GB storage, $0.025/build minute, $0.10/GB egress) instead of sales-quoted pricing
- + Clear isolation tiering: spot instances on free, reserved VM-isolated instances from Pro
- + First-class Rust framework support (Axum, Actix Web, Rocket, Serenity) and open-source platform code
Cons
- - Rust only — other language stacks are not supported today
- - Single AWS region (London, eu-west-2) with no region choice below the not-yet-available Enterprise tier
- - No published uptime SLA on any current tier; support is Discord-based with 1-business-day response on Pro
- - Steep jump from $20/mo Pro to $250/mo Growth, with metered usage on top of every paid tier
- - Tier contents have changed materially over time (projects and included egress were cut in 2025)
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