On Drift you sketch your app on Friday, deploy it on Sunday,
and your first users arrive on Monday.
We built Drift to be completely antithetical to the Big Three: AWS, GCP, Azure. Our invoicing is simple and transparent: pay for what you need and nothing more. No cold starts, no hidden fees, no dark patterns.
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, 2× scheduled jobs, 128 MiB memory, 20× realtime conns | €5.14 | $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 | €5.78/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. No Drift-specific files, 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.
Every Drift app is made up of four core pillars:
These primitives talk to each other behind the scenes for you. The infrastructure disappears in the background.
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, point it at the folder you are already standing in, and let it do the rest. Your first slice is free and it does not expire.
Drift is in closed alpha — we will update you when it is ready.