Choosing a Deployment Platform for APIs and MVPs: Cloudflare vs AWS vs Vercel vs Fly.io

Calendar February 22, 2026
Cloud-Services
Intermediate
Platform-Evaluation, Cost-Analysis, Deployment-Strategy, Migration-Planning
Cloudflare-Workers, Aws-Lambda, Vercel, Fly-Io, Deployment-Platform, Cost-Comparison, Free-Tier, Serverless, Hosting, Migration, Mvp, Api-Hosting
Cloudflare-Workers, Wrangler, Aws-Lambda, Aws-Api-Gateway, Vercel, Fly-Io, Flyctl, Docker

Choosing a Deployment Platform for APIs and MVPs#

Picking a deployment platform early in a project matters more than most teams realize. The platform determines your cost floor, your scaling ceiling, your deployment workflow, and how much operational overhead you carry. Switching later is possible but never free – you are always migrating data, rewriting config, and updating DNS.

This guide compares four platforms that cover the most common deployment scenarios: Cloudflare (Workers + D1 + Pages), AWS (Lambda + API Gateway + RDS + S3), Vercel (Pro + serverless functions), and Fly.io (Apps + Postgres). Each has a genuine sweet spot. None is best for everything.