Zeabur

What Zeabur actually is

Zeabur is a small, fast-moving deployment platform built by a Taiwanese team, now incorporated in the United States, that wants to be your AI-flavoured DevOps layer rather than another cloud. You point it at a Git repository or a Docker image, its build engine (zbpack, now the AI-assisted zbplan) detects the language and framework, and it provisions the service, the domain, the SSL and the monitoring without you writing CI configuration. In our view the deployment experience is genuinely good — the interesting question is what it runs on, and that changed materially in 2026.

For its first years Zeabur was a classic usage-billed PaaS on a shared Kubernetes cluster. That model is now closed: since 15 March 2026 no new projects can be created on the shared cluster, and since 1 April 2026 existing shared projects cannot add services. Today Zeabur sells two things on top of its platform subscription: servers rented through its marketplace from Tencent Cloud, Aliyun, Hetzner, AWS, Google Cloud, Linode, DigitalOcean and Volcengine at fixed monthly prices, or your own servers registered into the dashboard ("bring your own host", including devices connected via Wonder Mesh). The plan fee — $0, $5, $19 or $79 per month — is separate from the server cost. Anyone comparing Zeabur to Railway or Render on the old usage-based model is reading stale material, including, frankly, our own database row before this review.

Company background: founded in 2022 in Taiwan (Taoyuan/Taipei) by Yuanlin Lin, Xia Yuhang and Pin Hua Lee, with a team now split between San Francisco and Taipei. It closed a $2 million seed in late 2025 with 500 Global, Baidu Ventures and MiraclePlus participating. Third-party registries disagree on the founding year (2022, 2023 and 2025 all appear), and we have flagged that in the notes; the 2022 date is the best-evidenced.

Pricing: what you really pay

Two layers. First the platform plan: Free at $0, Dev at $5 per month (14-day free trial), Pro at $19 per month (14-day free trial), Team at $79 per month including 3 seats plus $24 per additional seat, and Enterprise by quote. What the plan buys you is dashboard capability: how many servers you can manage (1 / 3 / 10 / unlimited), CI build machine specs (2C4G on Free and Dev, 4C8G on Pro and Team), log retention (48 hours / 7 days / 30 days / 90 days), backups and log forwarding from Dev upward, and an AI agent quota (30 / 200 / 600 advanced-model messages per month). The Free plan is a real free tier — no credit card required — but services auto-sleep when idle (cold starts of a few seconds), there is no SLA, no Zeabur Email, and no automated database backup.

Second, the compute. Servers bought through Zeabur are billed monthly at fixed prices that depend entirely on provider and region. The published price-change notice effective 1 June 2026 gives concrete numbers: Tencent Cloud 2 vCPU / 2 GB at $2 per month rising to $3, 2 vCPU / 4 GB at $3 rising to $4 across Jakarta, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, Frankfurt and Ashburn; Aliyun 2 vCPU / 4 GB at $5 (mainland China) or $8 (Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore and other Asian cities), rising to $6 and $9; 4 vCPU / 8 GB from $15-16 rising to $16-17; 4 vCPU / 16 GB from $22-24 rising to $24-26. Hetzner, Linode, DigitalOcean, AWS and Google Cloud servers are also sold this way at their own fixed monthly rates.

Add that up honestly: a production app on the recommended Pro plan plus a modest server runs roughly $22-27 per month before tax. That is competitive with Render and Railway for steady workloads and cheap for Asian regions — Tencent and Aliyun nodes in Seoul, Jakarta, Manila and mainland China are the part of this catalogue that the big Western PaaS players simply do not offer. The catch is predictability: you pay for a whole server whether or not you use it, which is the opposite of the old pay-as-you-go pitch in Zeabur's own documentation.

Two billing practices we would want changed. Refunds to a payment card carry the Stripe transaction fee — Zeabur's docs put this at roughly 30% of the refunded amount — and servers created or renewed after 21 July 2025 are non-refundable. For a $3 VPS that hardly matters; for a $26/month cluster over an annual commitment it is real money.

Performance & infrastructure

Zeabur's own dedicated clusters span 10 regions: Newark, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Toronto, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore and Sydney. The marketplace extends well beyond that — Tencent Cloud regions alone add Seoul, Jakarta, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, São Paulo, Virginia, Silicon Valley, Hong Kong and mainland China (Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Guangzhou and others, where ICP registration is required before domain binding). For managed cloud buyers targeting Asia-Pacific, this is the strongest region list in the budget tier: Greater China and Southeast Asia coverage that Hetzner, DigitalOcean and most European hosts cannot match.

The platform layer is the value-add over renting the same VPS yourself: automatic project-type recognition and builds, one-click templates (databases, queues, common apps), generated domains with managed DNS and SSL, environment isolation, monitoring, log search and forwarding, automated database backups from the Dev plan, and an email service for transactional mail. There is an AI Hub (a unified LLM API gateway) and the Zeabur Agent, which takes natural-language instructions and provisions infrastructure — the feature the company is betting its seed round on. Build CI is a shared machine spec (2C4G or 4C8G depending on plan), separate from your runtime.

On reliability, be precise about what exists. There is no SLA on the Free plan; Enterprise plans get "dedicated support and SLAs". Pro and Team plans do not publish an uptime commitment, which in our view is the biggest gap in the offering. Your uptime is really the uptime of the underlying provider (Tencent, Hetzner, AWS) plus Zeabur's control plane and platform services — and the shared-cluster migration shows the platform layer is where the risk sits. We would run anything load-bearing on a purchased server with external monitoring, and treat the dashboard as a convenience layer, not the source of truth.

Where it falls short

The platform's model has changed twice in four years, most recently in a way that forced existing users off the shared cluster. A startup re-architecting its billing model is normal; doing it with six weeks' notice (announced for 15 March and 1 April 2026 effective dates) is the kind of thing we note when a customer's production depends on it. Budget with the assumption that the pricing you sign up for may not be the pricing you renew at — the June 2026 server price increases are the mild version of that.

Documentation quality is uneven: pricing and product pages are clear and the docs are open-source on GitHub, but operational guarantees (what exactly "backups" covers, what happens at plan limits, what the Enterprise SLA actually specifies) are thin or absent. Support is Discord-first with priority queues on higher plans, which suits solo developers and would make an IT director nervous.

Maturity comparisons are fair game: Render and Railway have larger engineering teams, longer track records and more predictable platforms; Fly.io has a stronger global edge story; the hyperscalers have the compliance portfolio. Zeabur competes on Asian region coverage, an AI agent that actually does things, and low fixed prices — not on enterprise assurance. Team features (roles and permissions) only arrived with the $79 plan, and single-file upload limits (50 MB on Free, 250 MB on Dev+) are a small reminder that the platform is still rough at the edges.

Who should pick this

Our pick for individual developers and small teams in Asia-Pacific who want PaaS ergonomics on infrastructure close to their users: a Next.js front-end, an API, a Postgres and a Redis on a Tokyo or Singapore node, deployed from Git, for a few dollars a month plus a plan fee. The Greater China and Southeast Asia footprint (Seoul, Jakarta, Manila, Hong Kong, mainland China) is the specific reason to choose Zeabur over Western alternatives — nobody else in this price range sells those regions with a managed platform on top. Bring-your-own-server makes it a cheap control plane for a Hetzner box in Europe as well.

We would not pick it for regulated workloads, for teams that need a contractual uptime guarantee, or for anyone who reads a pricing model change as a red flag. If your workload is European or US-only and you want maturity, managed cloud incumbents with published SLAs are the safer spend.

On our benchmarks page we have not run Zeabur: the platform's performance is dominated by whichever underlying provider and instance you buy, so a Zeabur number would really be a Tencent or Hetzner number with a nicer dashboard.

Key takeaways

• Taiwan-founded (2022), US-incorporated, ~$2M seed (500 Global, Baidu Ventures, MiraclePlus) — a young, small vendor, and it behaves like one.
• The usage-billed shared cluster is gone: since March/April 2026 it is plan fee ($0-$79/mo) plus fixed-price servers from Tencent, Aliyun, Hetzner, AWS, GCP, Linode, DO and Volcengine, or your own hosts.
• Strongest point is APAC coverage: Zeabur's own 10 regions plus marketplace nodes in Seoul, Jakarta, Manila, Hong Kong and mainland China.
• Cheap and concrete: Tencent 2C/2GB from $2-3/mo, 2C/4GB from $3-4/mo; a Pro-plan production setup lands around $22-27/mo total.
• Real free tier (with auto-sleep and no SLA), backups from the Dev plan, AI agent quotas by plan — but no published uptime guarantee below Enterprise.
• Treat pricing as provisional: two model changes and a server price rise within 2026, plus a 30%-fee refund policy and no server refunds after July 2025.

Sources

• https://zeabur.com/pricing
• https://zeabur.com/docs/
• https://zeabur.com/docs/en-US/pricing/pricing-plans
• https://zeabur.com/docs/en-US/pricing/free-plan
• https://zeabur.com/docs/en-US/subscription
• https://zeabur.com/product/dedicated-server
• https://zeabur.com/changelogs/tencent-cloud-managed-server
• https://zeabur.com/zh-CN/pricing/server-price-update
• https://whichdevtool.com/tools/zeabur/
• https://thecompanycheck.com/company/b/zeabur/33fc5cdaae8045e4a
• https://startuply.vc/startup/zeabur-135bna
• https://indexed.vc/companies/zeabur
• https://devtune.ai/verticals/deployment-and-hosting-platforms/zeabur/alternatives