Sprint Pack: The First $1 Container Hosting Pass in PaaS [2026]

Heroku killed its free tier on November 28, 2022. Three and a half years later, the cheapest way to keep a managed container running on a major PaaS is still a $5/month subscription that auto-renews whether you used it or not. We did the math on our own usage and on hundreds of side projects — most developers genuinely need always-on hosting for 48 hours every few weeks, not 720 hours every month. So we built the Sprint Pack: $1 USD / ₹99 INR, one-time, 24 hours of unlimited deploys plus Always-On for one Small container. As far as we can tell, this is the first managed container PaaS to offer a one-time 24-hour Always-On pass under $5.

The problem with $5/month subscriptions for 48-hour projects

Pick the cheapest tier on any managed PaaS in 2026 and you're paying for time you'll never use:

• Heroku Eco dyno: $5/month — 1,000 shared dyno-hours, auto-renews
• Railway Hobby: $5/month usage minimum, 30-day trial credit on signup
• Render Starter Web Service: $7/month — 512 MB, 0.5 CPU, auto-renews
• DigitalOcean App Platform: $5/month — auto-renews
• Fly.io: pay-as-you-go, ~$2/month for a minimal always-on shared-cpu-1x VM

If you actually use a container for 48 hours a month — a weekend project, a hackathon demo, a job-interview portfolio, a client preview — you're paying $0.10 per hour of real use on a $5 plan and getting 670 hours of paid idle time you'll never touch. The economics break down even harder if you abandon the project mid-month and forget to cancel.

Free tiers help, but every free tier on a managed PaaS comes with the same trade-off: aggressive cold starts. Render's free tier spins down after 15 minutes and takes 30-50 seconds to wake. SnapDeploy's free tier auto-sleeps after 45 minutes with ~60-second wake. For a working app you can browse and iterate against, that's fine. For a live demo with a paying client on the line, it's not.

What the Sprint Pack actually is

One-time purchase. $1 USD or ₹99 INR (auto-detected by region via Razorpay). Activates immediately. Grants two entitlements bundled together:

1. Unlimited deploys for 24 hours. The free-tier cap of 5 deploys per 12 hours is lifted for the pack's lifetime. Push as many commits as you need.
2. Always-On for one Small (512 MB) container. Pick any of your Small containers and assign the pack to it. No auto-sleep, no cold starts, no 60-second wake for the full 24 hours.

At the 24-hour mark, the container reverts to auto-sleep and your deploy limit returns to the free-tier 5/12h. The container itself stays deployed — no data loss. You can buy another Sprint Pack at any point.

Sprint Pack vs every major PaaS (verified May 2026)

All prices verified against official pricing pages on 2026-05-13. Hetzner Cloud (€3.79/mo CX22) and Vultr ($2.50/mo IPv6-only) are VPS, not managed PaaS — they don't include zero-config language detection, Git-push deploys, or auto-sleep, so they aren't directly comparable.

How it works under the hood

A Sprint Pack purchase goes through Razorpay (PCI-DSS compliant) and creates a time-bounded entitlement on your account. The pack itself is stored as an Always-On subscription row with planType=SPRINT_PACK and an expiresAt 24 hours in the future. You assign it to a Small container the same way you assign a regular monthly Always-On subscription.

When the pack expires, a scheduled job marks the row as EXPIRED, unassigns it from the container, and the container's alwaysOn flag flips back to false. Auto-sleep resumes from then on. We send a single notification email at the moment of expiry so you know to re-deploy or buy another pack.

Stacking is additive on the expiry timestamp, not on real time. If you buy a second Sprint Pack 5 hours into the first one (19 hours remaining), the new expiry becomes 43 hours from now, not 24 + 24. This means you can't accidentally "waste" a stacked pack by buying it too early. Full stacking rules are on the Sprint Pack page.

Where Sprint Pack is the right call

Weekend projects and hackathons

If you're building for 24-48 hours and need a public URL that doesn't cold-start, the math is unbeatable. $5/month on Heroku Eco gets you 720 hours of always-on per month at $0.0069/hour. Sprint Pack gets you 24 hours at $0.042/hour — 6× more per hour, but you stop paying when you stop using.

Client demos and interview portfolios

A live demo for a paying client is the worst place to discover a cold-start. Buy a Sprint Pack ten minutes before the call, assign it to your portfolio container, and the URL stays warm for the entire 24-hour window. Same for job interviews — your portfolio is ready when the recruiter clicks the link.

Try-before-you-subscribe stress testing

Considering the $12/month Always-On Mini subscription but don't want to commit without running your actual traffic? Sprint Pack is the cheapest possible load test. Drive your real traffic for 24 hours, watch the dashboard, decide whether the Mini tier fits your workload. If it does, upgrade. If not, you've spent $1.

Where Sprint Pack is the wrong call

• Recurring uptime needs. If you'll need always-on every month, $12/month Mini costs less than 12 Sprint Packs and never expires.
• Medium or Large containers. Sprint Pack is locked to Small (512 MB). Medium and Large use the regular $25/$45 per-month Always-On subscriptions.
• GPU workloads. T4 and A10G GPU containers run on a separate per-hour credit system (covered in our GPU pricing guide).
• Refund expectations. Sprint Packs are non-refundable for unused time. We do refund full $1 if activation fails on our end — email [email protected] within 7 days.

Why $1 actually works for us

A common reaction is "$1 can't be sustainable." Worth showing the math. A Sprint Pack-assigned Small container runs on AWS Fargate at roughly $0.012/hour (0.25 vCPU + 512 MB RAM at Fargate spot pricing). 24 hours = ~$0.29 of compute. Razorpay processing fees on $1 are ~6-7% ($0.07). That leaves ~$0.65 margin per pack, which covers the fixed-cost amortization of the SnapDeploy control plane, build pipeline, and customer support.

It's a low-margin product on purpose. The Sprint Pack isn't a profit center — it's an acquisition channel and a conversion bridge to the $12/month subscription. Internal target: 15%+ of Sprint Pack buyers convert to a monthly Always-On subscription within 30 days. We didn't need to engineer scarcity or up-pricing tactics — the product math works when the conversion math works.

Try it

Open the Sprint Pack landing page to read the full feature list, or jump straight to /billing#sprint-pack-card if you're already logged in. New here? Sign up for the free tier first — 10 deploys per day, no credit card. When you hit the deploy cap or need always-on for the weekend, the Sprint Pack is one click away.

If you've been waiting for a PaaS that bills the way you actually use it, this is it. If we missed something, tell us. Related reading: why idle containers are a tax you don't have to pay, our updated Heroku alternatives roundup, and the free-tier deployment guide if you haven't tried SnapDeploy yet.