Linode Pricing: Plans, Costs and Extra Fees (2026)
Nov 5, 202613 min read
You can predict a small steady workload's bill before you sign up, whether it hosts a website or runs automations built with Activepieces.
Linode charges a fixed monthly price per server, bills by the hour but never past that monthly figure, and includes a transfer allowance.
The server price isn't the whole bill, though. Transfer beyond the allowance, backups and add-ons all sit on top. If you compare only the headline rate, you find that out on the first invoice, which costs more than reading the price list carefully now.
Linode's flat monthly rates
What Linode costs in one paragraph
The card below shows the entry plan as listed on the check date. Take from it that the starting price is the price you pay, not a teaser for a metered bill.
- $5/month for the Nanode 1GB entry plan: - Hourly billing, capped at the monthly price: - 1 TB of transfer included on Nanode
- Checked 5 November 2026
Leave a server running all month and the cap keeps it at the monthly price, never above. A server you delete after a few days costs only the hours it ran.
What Linode is now that Akamai owns it
Linode is the compute service of Akamai Cloud: you rent virtual servers, which are slices of a larger machine that behave like a computer of your own. Akamai is best known for delivering websites and video quickly.
For you, that means the pricing page you read lives under Akamai's cloud branding, so search for either name when you look for current rates.
Every price in this article's from Linode's own pricing page, as it stood on 5 November 2026. I used no reseller listings and no comparison sites.
If you are running this arithmetic for your own team, see what the same workload costs on Activepieces.
Every current Linode plan, price and included transfer
From $5 to $192 a month, Shared plans each come with transfer pooled and included, and every other family or add-on is billed per unit from the same published list.
viz type=matrix title="How Linode Shared CPU plans scale from 1 GB to 32 GB" unit="index, 1GB plan = 100" source="HostingDive - https://hostingdive.com/linode-akamai-real-cost/" cols="1GB,2GB,4GB,8GB,16GB,32GB"92 across the Shared plans, while included transfer only goes from 1 to 16." Monthly price: 5, 12, 24, 48, 96, 192 Included transfer: 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 16 Storage: 25, 50, 80, 160, 320, 640
The table shows what each line bills on, so you can see which ones belong in your estimate.
Compute plans table
| Row | Unit billed | Price | Specs | Transfer | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shared, Dedicated, High Memory, Premium, GPU | Per instance, monthly or hourly | Fixed per size, on the live pricing page | Fixed CPU, RAM, storage per size | Included, pooled across your instances | Capped by plan size |
| Backups, NodeBalancers, Block/Object Storage, Managed DB, Kubernetes | Per service, per month | Listed per tier | Set by tier | Counts against the same pool | Per-service quotas |
| Overage | Per GB beyond the pool | Listed rate | n/a | Applies only after the pool is spent | Billed on the next invoice |
The Shared ladder shows the catch. According to HostingDive, monthly price climbs $5, $12, $24, $48, $96, $192, while included transfer climbs 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 16 TB and storage 25, 50, 80, 160, 320, 640 GB.
That means customers upgrading from $24 to $48 monthly receive only 1 additional TB of transfer despite the price doubling. Price rises thirty-eight-fold; transfer only sixteen-fold. If you step up for bandwidth, you pay more per terabyte at the top.
A $24 server with backups, a load balancer and a database isn't a $24 bill, because each add-on is its own line. Price every one before you compare against a metered rival, because the add-ons are where flat pricing quietly stops being flat.
Before you deploy, check the rate for the region you'll actually use, since some cost more than the base rate.
A real monthly bill for a five-person team
Five other lines join the server price on a five-person team's bill, and those lines, not the $24 headline, decide whether the month comes in where you planned. Region choice multiplies all of them, which is why it came first.
The workload and the line-by-line bill
Picture one 4GB app server, a small managed database, a NodeBalancer (Linode's load balancer), backups, and 200 GB of Block Storage. The server at $24 is the line everyone quotes, so it's the one least likely to surprise you.
The table shows each line under a managed database and under one you run yourself, and the bottom rows are the ones to compare.
| Line item | Managed database | Self-run database |
|---|---|---|
| 4GB app server | $24 | $24 |
| Database | Separate managed plan | Runs on your own server, no separate line |
| NodeBalancer | Own monthly line | Own monthly line |
| Backups | Own monthly line | Own monthly line |
| 200 GB Block Storage | $20 | $20 |
| Transfer | Drawn from pooled allowance | Drawn from pooled allowance |
| Total | Every line above added | Same, minus the database plan |
| Delta | Baseline | The managed database plan, less your time |
Read the last row as a trade, not a saving: the plan fee disappears, and the work it covered lands on you.
Double the traffic and it costs nothing extra until your combined allowance runs out, because transfer is pooled. Check it once a quarter.
If you self-host the database, you drop the managed plan, but patching, backup testing and restores become your job. If nobody on the team will do that reliably, the managed fee's cheaper than the first bad night.
Fees and limits that change a Linode bill
Five charges account for most of the surprises, since the headline instance rate's only part of what you pay. Each looks small alone, but together they decide whether the flat price holds:
- Overage of $0.005/GB once you pass the pooled transfer allowance
- Backups, priced by instance size
- Powered-off instances, which are still billed: - A minimum charge on Object Storage
- Hourly billing, capped at the monthly price
The first matters most for traffic-heavy workloads, and the rest catch people who assume a quiet server costs nothing.
Past the pool, EgressCost puts Linode at $0.005 per GB, Vultr at $0.01 and AWS Lightsail at $0.09. Linode's overage is half Vultr's and about a eighteenth of Lightsail's. A traffic spike therefore costs you per gigabyte, so it can add up on an invoice.
A shut-down instance keeps its disk and IP reserved, so it keeps billing. Delete what you're done with, because "off" saves nothing.
Before comparing against a provider that bundles backups, add the backup line to your estimate. On bigger servers it costs more, because the price follows instance size. Object Storage has a minimum charge, so a few gigabytes won't be nearly free.
**Delete what you're done with, because "off" saves nothing.
You should check your account's resource limits before launch day. New accounts can be capped on how many instances they can run, and raising a cap takes a support request, not a click.
Worth checking against a plan that does not meter every step: one credit covers a whole run on Activepieces.
When hyperscalers beat Linode's pricing
Ask early, because the other side has a real argument: for some buyers, a hyperscaler's discounts, credits and managed services will beat Linode's flat pricing, and you should know which buyers those are before you commit.
Discounts and reserved pricing elsewhere
AWS and its rivals hand out startup credits, free tiers and commitment discounts. A credit can cover a first year's bill entirely, so a small team may pay nothing while Linode charges from day one.
Reserved and savings plans, where you promise to use a set amount for a year or three in exchange for a lower rate, can cut the instance price well below the listed one.
It shows the gap's large, but a credit hides that gap only while the credit lasts.
When it runs out, the metered rate's what you pay.
The same trap shows up in the tools you run on the server, where billing by detail taxes the builder for splitting work into smaller, safer steps.
Activepieces charges 1 credit per flow run however many steps it holds, so a ten-step flow costs what the two-step workaround did.
Zapier bills per task and Make per module, and on Activepieces the Plus plan is $20 a month for 10,000 credits, so the run is what gets metered.
If your users are mostly in Europe and you only need plain virtual machines, Hetzner wins on the headline number, and you should say so plainly. Hetzner, a German hosting company, lists lower prices than Linode for comparable small servers.
What you give up is a smaller set of regions and add-ons, which matters if your customers sit elsewhere.
Managed services hyperscalers offer that Linode lacks
Managed databases, identity systems, queues and security tooling are what hyperscalers sell that you'd otherwise build and watch yourself. Doing that work yourself costs staff hours, and a missed patch costs more than a month of hosting.
Akamai, the content delivery and security company that owns Linode, has been widening Linode's managed offering, but the catalog is still thinner.
If your workload leans on those services, the cheaper instance isn't the cheaper bill.
Linode against DigitalOcean, Vultr, Hetzner and AWS Lightsail
The cheaper instance only becomes the cheaper bill if the traffic charge's low too, and on overage Linode charges the least of the providers with a sourced rate here.
Price, transfer and overage compared
Once you exceed the transfer your plan includes, you pay overage per gigabyte. The table shows that rate for four providers. The take-away's how far apart they sit.
| Provider | Overage per GB |
|---|---|
| Linode | $0.005 |
| DigitalOcean | $0.01 |
| Vultr | $0.01 |
| AWS Lightsail | $0.09 |
Those rates come from StackValueLab. Linode charges half a cent per GB, so 1,000 GB over your allowance costs $5. DigitalOcean and Vultr charge a cent, so the same overrun costs $10.
Lightsail charges nine cents, so it costs $90. A traffic spike that's a rounding error on Linode is a real line item on Lightsail.
Before you commit, pull monthly price, backup cost and managed database entry price from each vendor's own pricing page, dated. They belong in this comparison too, because the overage rate alone doesn't settle the bill.
Where Linode wins and where it loses
When your traffic's large enough to cross the included allowance, Linode wins. Every extra terabyte costs half what DigitalOcean or Vultr would charge, and a fraction of Lightsail's. For a small steady workload that sometimes spikes, that predictability's the whole point.
As your traffic falls, Linode's lead shrinks. If you stay inside the included transfer, the overage rate never applies, and the choice comes down to the monthly instance price and what you pay for backups and a managed database.
Another provider can undercut Linode there, and the overage figures above won't show it.
Check your actual monthly traffic first. If you move less than the allowance, shop on the base price. If you regularly exceed it, the overage rate decides the bill.
Linode bill monitoring and automated alerts
Whether you stay under the pooled transfer allowance or blow past it, the bill only stays predictable if someone looks at it, and one Monday morning's enough to set that up.
Work through the list below in order, because each step uses what the one before it found. Do it once, then repeat it whenever you add a server.
- Price the workload with the table. Take the pricing table from earlier, add your instances, backups, and any add-ons, and write down the monthly total. That number's what every later alert gets measured against.
- Set a billing alert. Pick a dollar amount a little above your total, so you hear about drift before the invoice arrives instead of after.
- Set a transfer alert. Choose a point short of your pooled allowance, so you get a warning while there's still time to find out why traffic jumped.
- Delete powered-off instances. A switched-off server still bills, because Linode reserves the hardware for you. If you won't boot it this month, snapshot what you need and remove it.
- Review whether you need backups. Backups are a paid add-on per instance. Keep them on anything you couldn't rebuild in an afternoon, and drop them on test machines you could.
None of this changes the rates. It stops a small, steady bill from quietly becoming a larger one.
Automate usage alerts with Activepieces
Once the manual checks are in place, you can make them run without you.
Activepieces can call the Linode API on a schedule, read your current usage, and post a warning to Slack or send an email when it crosses your line, and with unlimited flows on every plan, including the free one, that check costs one credit per run however many steps it has.
This is optional. The built-in alerts from steps two and three already cover the basics, and this adds a regular summary you don't have to remember to open.
Frequently asked questions
Four billing answers cover most of what readers ask, and getting any of them wrong shows up as a surprise on the invoice:
- Linode bills hourly, with a monthly ceiling on each instance.
- A powered-off instance's still charged, because its disk and reserved resources stay allocated.
- Transfer's pooled across every instance on the account, not allotted per instance.
- Usage past the pooled allowance's billed per gigabyte at the published overage rate.
Account and free-tier questions
The questions below fill in what those lines leave out.
Are Linode and Akamai Cloud the same service? Yes. Akamai acquired Linode and now sells it as Akamai Cloud, so you'll see both names on the website, in documentation and in older tutorials. The service and the flat pricing model are the same one.
There's no permanent free tier like the always-free allowances some hyperscalers offer. New accounts have often been offered promotional credit, but the amount and terms change. Check the current offer on the signup page before you count on it in your budget.
Hourly billing and overage questions
Billing's both hourly and monthly, in a sense. The rate's quoted per hour and per month. You pay for the hours an instance exists, and the charge stops growing once it reaches the monthly figure.
To stop paying, delete the instance. Shutting it down isn't enough.
If you exceed your transfer allowance, your service keeps running. The extra gigabytes are added to your invoice at the per-gigabyte overage rate. Because the allowance's pooled, one quiet server can cover for a busy one, so check the account total before assuming you're over.
Currency and invoicing
Standard self-serve accounts are billed in US dollars, and your card issuer converts the charge. If your finance team needs invoices in another currency, ask Akamai's sales team. Contract arrangements may differ from the published self-serve terms.
Related reading
Running the numbers
See what the same workload costs here.
Free forever plan, and every paid plan self-hosts at no extra cost.
See pricing Talk to sales
