Used Render's free plan but switched to Northflank; Render is easier to set up but was banned once over an admin page showing CPU and RAM.
60signal
59reviewsi
A score out of 100. Negative and mixed reviews take points off, and so does having only a few reviews, so a handful of glowing reviews can’t beat a product many people like.
37% Positive26% Mixed37% Negative
Customers say Render is easy to deploy to and praise a free plan and predictable pricing, which suits hobby projects and small apps.
What customers love, and what they don’tWhat customers noticed
Customer reviews (59)
Add your reviewShowing 22 reviews mentioning easy to use Show all
Render is super easy but webhooks only come with the $20/mo plan, so they moved to a cheaper Hetzner VPS.
They pay about 20 dollars a month for a backend service plus SQL, with a free static frontend including CDN. They find it dead simple to use and say it has basically replaced Heroku for them.
They now use Render for all their recent projects after running many sites on a single Linode VPS, and prefer deploying by git push over writing ansible scripts.
Loves Render's dev experience but the lack of GPUs is a dealbreaker for serious AI projects.
Uses Render as the best option, easy to deploy with database and Redis options and easy to scale.
Uses Render for the frontend and most of the backend, only putting an always-running process on DigitalOcean.
Deploys a Next.js app on Render and is pretty happy with it so far.
Runs 6 paid services plus a free one on Render; easy devops but each site goes down about monthly and support was aloof.
Render worked OK as a Heroku-lite for a toy app, but switched to Railway because Render charged $10/mo for Postgres.
Calls Render their favorite hosting site by a massive margin, running 14 and later nearly 20 services on it for two years with zero issues.
Likes Render but had the same free-tier suspension with zero warning and is now hesitant to rely on it.
Render was very convenient but ran 24/7 at about $25/month for a rarely used API, so cost-effectiveness was poor.
Easy deploy of a Next app, Express API, Postgres, Redis and cron on Render; no downtime and outages were communicated well.
A simple API function would not run on Vercel but ran fine on Render, which also handles their cron jobs and databases alongside the web deployment, so they stick with Render.
Trying Render: very easy, but dislikes low bandwidth limits with steep overage charges.
Render's failed-deploy logs clearly showed the failing test, unlike App Runner; nice but per-user cost felt too high.
Deployed several Rails apps on Render; the process was simple and it met all their needs.
Switched a backend from Vercel to Render after CORS configuration trouble and so far likes it.
Likes Render's Vercel-like interface; the free plan is more than enough.
Four dev teams on paid Render accounts and it has been a dream, including Docker in production.
Used Render for a couple of Express backends; very easy and similar to Heroku.
Common questions about Render
What do customers say about Render?
Customers say Render is easy to deploy to and praise a free plan and predictable pricing, which suits hobby projects and small apps. The main downsides are slow free-tier spin-downs and cold starts, free-tier suspensions with little warning, and costs that add up across many services.
Is Render worth it?
Of the 27 reviews with a clear verdict, 37% are positive, 26% mixed and 37% negative. The praise mentioned most is easy to use. The most common complaint is slow.
What do people like about Render?
The praise reviewers mention most: easy to use (8 reviews), good free plan (5 reviews) and reliable (5 reviews). For example: Uses Render for the frontend and most of the backend, only putting an always-running process on DigitalOcean.
What are the most common complaints about Render?
The complaints reviewers mention most: slow (4 reviews), poor support (2 reviews) and hidden fees (1 review). For example: Django app on Render free tier: after a day or two the home page took 1-2 minutes to load and sometimes failed to start.
What does the signal score of 60 mean?
It's how well reviewed Render is, out of 100. Negative and mixed reviews take points off, and so does having only a few reviews: a service needs plenty of them, compared with the most-reviewed services here, to reach the high 80s and 90s. It's worked out from reviews only, needs at least 5 of them, and updates as new ones come in.
What are the specs of Render?
Category: Cloud platform. Free plan: Yes.
Where do these Render reviews come from?
59 are quotes from Reddit, each linked to the original. Customer reviews are checked for spam before they appear. Every review, written here or quoted, is read as positive, mixed or negative.
