On Drift you sketch your app on Friday, deploy it on Sunday,
and your first users arrive on Monday.
No request charges. No egress charges. No bill that can arrive larger than the one you agreed to. Nothing meters in the background, so an idle slice costs exactly what a busy one costs. That is the part AWS cannot copy without dismantling how it makes money.
You do not have to take our word for the number either. You choose a slice's resources in a browser form that recomputes the itemised monthly total as you change a value, and you see that figure before the slice exists and before you have paid anyone anything. The form and the invoice are priced by the same code, so the quote is the bill.
Pre-pay for your consumption, and rest assured that your digital presence will be up and running for that period of time. You get a 7 day grace period before your renewal, and you can always export your app and take it somewhere else.
We compared an application using 10 Atomic functions, 2 scheduled jobs, a NoSQL database, 2 GB of uploads, a production website, and a small live/realtime feature. Priced on both sides from public rates.*
* Azure prices are current public list rates as of July, 2026 (EP1 Premium plan, Cosmos DB Serverless, Static Web Apps Standard), not padded with extras Azure would likely also bill for, like Application Insights or egress.
| Resource | Drift | Azure |
|---|---|---|
| 10× functions booking 128 MiB between them, 2× scheduled jobs, 20× realtime conns | €4.64 | $150–180 |
| ~2.55 GiB storage (database, uploads, site) | €0.64 | $0.30–0.55 |
| Website hosting (custom domain, SLA) | included above | $9.00 |
| Total | €5.28/mo | ≈$160–190/mo |
From 12 January 2027, the EU Data Act makes that a legal right for every cloud customer in Europe — not just good practice.
Drift already ships the command for it: drift slice snapshot download exports your original source code, secrets, every NoSQL document, blobs, queues, and Canvas sites, as a plain tar.gz. Your source comes back with every Drift-generated wrapper stripped out, no proprietary format, nothing to reverse-engineer.
To us, portability was a fundamental design decision, not an afterthought or something we implemented because we were forced to.
Avoid resource catalog fatigue and go back to the basics: Drift offers everything you need to compose a fast and secure app, and nothing more. If you can write it in one night, you should be able to deploy it in one night, too.
That is a hyposcaler: small on purpose, rather than not yet large. A short catalogue is not a short list of parts — the network boundary, the TLS, the encryption at rest and the isolation are all there on the first deploy. They are simply not optional, and not sold separately.
Every Drift app is made up of four core pillars:
These primitives talk to each other for you. The infrastructure underneath does not disappear — it stops being your job to assemble, and stops being something you can leave switched off.
You get one free Slice the moment you register. Use it to experiment or actually ship something: a personal portfolio, a landing page, a blog. It's yours; what you build with it is up to you.
You can always create new Slices and pay for what you need in every case. If you outgrow a Slice you can always resize it piecemeal: maybe you need one more function, maybe you need to add 20MB to your SQL collection. You only pay the difference from the resizing.
Start
Install the CLI, take your free slice, then point it at the folder you are already standing in and let it do the rest. That slice is free and it does not expire.
Drift is in closed alpha — we will update you when it is ready.