Prefect
Indicative from-price range
Indicative from-price range for self-hosting Prefect on 1 server: about $24 to $112 per month (USD), as of 2026-10-19, for the reference workload (Peak concurrent flow runs: 20; Active scheduled flows: 100). From-price by provider, each the cheapest server in that provider's own shortlist: $24 on DigitalOcean (basic-2vcpu-4gb, 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, fra1); $49 on Google Cloud (e2-standard-2, 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, us-central1); $63 on Amazon Web Services (c9g.large, 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, us-east-1); $64 on OVHcloud (rise-1, 6 vCPU, 32 GB RAM, eu-west); $66 on Microsoft Azure (D2as_v7, 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, eastus); $66 on Hetzner (AX41, 6 vCPU, 64 GB RAM, eu-central); $262 on Servers.com (dl-01, 8 vCPU, 64 GB RAM, eu-west).
Reference workload
- Peak concurrent flow runs: 20
- Active scheduled flows: 100
Methodology
This range is generated automatically from public provider price lists. It has not been reviewed by a person, it is not a quote, and it may differ from the total the calculator chooses for your own workload with its AI step. Method: the calculator's offer shortlist for the reference workload (the same ranking it builds before the AI step, up to 12 offers across providers; 12 here) is priced at its monthly list price in USD. The low end is the cheapest of the per-provider from-prices below and the high end is the median server of the combined shortlist, each multiplied by 1, the smallest baseline topology (single-node). The from-price for each provider applies the same method to that provider's own shortlist (the calculator's ranking restricted to that provider), so it is the cheapest server that ranking offers there, not a recommendation. Prices are taken from the price snapshot dated 2026-10-19; prices quoted in EUR are converted with the ECB reference rate dated 2026-10-19. Servers with fewer than 2 vCPU or less than 4 GB RAM are not priced. Only server rental list prices for the product's own servers are counted: dependencies, licences, support, traffic charges, taxes and setup fees are not included.
Price sources
- Amazon Web Services: https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonEC2/current/us-east-1/index.json
- DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets
- Google Cloud: https://cloudbilling.googleapis.com/v1/services/6F81-5844-456A/skus
- Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/_resources/app/data/app/live_data_en_EUR.json
- Microsoft Azure: https://prices.azure.com/api/retail/prices
- OVHcloud: https://eu.api.ovh.com/1.0/order/catalog/public/eco?ovhSubsidiary=FR
- Servers.com: https://www.servers.com/products/scalable-bare-metal
Size Prefect for your own workloadMarkdown versionFor AI agents (llms.txt)
Prefect is a Python-native workflow orchestration framework that turns ordinary functions into monitored, retryable flows and tasks, handling scheduling, state tracking, and failure recovery for data and ML pipelines.
What gets deployed with it
- PostgreSQL HA Cluster — required Prefect Server requires PostgreSQL for production deployments. SQLite is supported only for local development. The database stores flow run state, task runs, deployment definitions, and worker heartbeats.
Baseline topologies
| Topology | Minimum nodes | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| single-node | 1 | prefect-server |
| server-plus-workers | 2 | prefect-server, prefect-worker |
What drives the cost
- Peak concurrent flow runs
- Peak number of flow runs executing simultaneously. Primary driver for worker node count and CPU/RAM headroom on execution infrastructure.
- Active scheduled flows
- Total number of flows with active schedules. Drives Prefect Server scheduler heartbeat load and database poll frequency.
Where it runs
bare_metal, dedicated, cloud_vm
Size Prefect and get a cost estimate