Faable vs sota.io: Bundled Identity, Unbundled Database

Most posts in this series start with a jurisdiction gap — a platform that hosts in the EU but is legally a US company (Railway, Out Plane) or sits outside any EU adequacy arrangement altogether (InstaPods). Faable doesn't give us that story. It's operated by Faable Cloud SLU, a Spanish limited company (Sociedad Limitada Unipersonal), governed by Spanish law with disputes falling under the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Madrid, per Faable's own Terms of Service. Its privacy policy names the Spanish data protection authority (AEPD) as supervisory authority. On the jurisdiction question, this lands exactly where our comparisons against Coolify, Zerops, and HostStack landed: both companies are EU-incorporated, both are reachable only through EU courts and EU data protection law, and the US CLOUD Act simply doesn't apply to either. That's parity, not an edge for either side — so this comparison is about something else: what each platform actually bundles into its subscription, and what that bundle costs.

What Faable is

Faable's own positioning, from its FAQ, names Vercel, Render, and Railway as the platforms it competes with. The pitch is two products sold together: Faable Deploy (zero-config, git-connected CI/CD and hosting) and Faable Auth (a multi-tenant OAuth 2.0 / OIDC identity server with social login, positioned against Auth0, Clerk, and Keycloak). Faable's own comparison page summarizes the pitch as "100% European hosting, full GDPR compliance, a built-in Web Application Firewall, and direct support from the engineers who run the platform" — plus, unlike the three competitors it names, an identity server bundled into the same subscription.

That's a genuinely different value proposition than sota.io's. sota.io doesn't sell an auth server or a WAF — its bundle is git/CLI/API/AI-agent deploy, automatic HTTPS, gVisor container isolation, and managed PostgreSQL per app, all EU-hosted on Hetzner. Faable, per its own documentation, does the opposite: its database guide covers SQLite, and neither its pricing page nor its docs describe a managed relational database service at all. If your app needs Postgres, Faable's own product surface doesn't provide it — you'd bring your own external database. If your team needs OAuth/OIDC login with social providers, sota.io's own surface doesn't provide that — you'd bring your own auth provider (Faable Auth, Auth0, Clerk, or similar). Two platforms selling into the same "EU-native git-push PaaS" category, but bundling opposite halves of a typical app's dependency list.

The bill: two line items before you've deployed anything

Faable's pricing page describes the billing model as "hybrid" — a monthly platform fee plus usage-based compute and overage charges, billed in EUR excluding VAT, "monthly, in arrears." The platform tiers themselves:

That platform fee doesn't include compute — instances are billed separately from Faable's own instance catalog:

Bandwidth beyond the bundled allowance is billed at €0.24/GB on Hobby and €0.18/GB on Pro. For a single always-on 2 vCPU service, the realistic entry point is the Hobby plan plus bi.medium: €15 + €50 = €65/month, before any bandwidth overage or a second Faable Auth account. That's two separate meters (platform fee, instance fee) stacked before the app has served a single request — and Faable's own catalog never states whether that compute is dedicated or shared vCPU; the instance table lists core counts and RAM only. sota.io's public plan pages currently describe what's included per tier (CLI/API/AI-agent deploy, managed Postgres per app, automatic HTTPS, gVisor isolation, EU hosting) without publishing prices yet — Developer and Team are marked "available at GA" on sota.io's pricing page, with only Enterprise onboarding open today. That's a real gap on sota.io's side worth stating plainly: Faable ships a working self-serve free tier and a real Hobby signup right now; sota.io's self-serve tiers are still pre-launch. If "I can sign up and deploy in the next five minutes without talking to anyone" matters more to you than the eventual price, Faable currently wins that comparison outright.

Where each platform is honestly ahead

Faable's real advantages: a working, no-waitlist free tier; a bundled OAuth2/OIDC identity server that would otherwise be a separate Auth0/Clerk subscription; a bundled WAF (OWASP Core Rule Set, per Faable's own docs) on every plan, something sota.io doesn't offer at all; and broader framework support in its docs (Faable's guides reference Next.js, Django, Flask, and PHP/Laravel, versus sota.io's currently listed Next.js, Node.js, and Python auto-detection).

sota.io's real advantages: a managed PostgreSQL database per app, which Faable's product line doesn't offer (SQLite only, per Faable's own database guide) — for any app that needs a real relational database, that's an entire separate piece of infrastructure Faable customers have to provision and secure themselves. sota.io also documents AI-agent-native deployment (CLI, REST API, and MCP so Claude Code and similar agents can deploy directly) — nothing in Faable's documentation mentions AI-agent or MCP-based deployment. And sota.io's SLA/incident-response commitments sit in the Enterprise tier available today; Faable's Terms are explicit that its Free and Hobby plans carry "no uptime commitment, no SLA, no guaranteed support response time," and any liability is capped at fees paid in the prior 12 months — or zero, for the unpaid Free tier.

Neither company holds ISO 27001 or SOC 2 — worth knowing if a certificate is a hard procurement requirement, but not a reason to pick one over the other today. And on jurisdiction, as established above, this is parity: two EU-incorporated companies, two EU data protection regimes, no CLOUD Act exposure on either side.

The actual decision

If your stack already needs its own OAuth/OIDC provider and you'd rather not run a separate Auth0 or Clerk subscription, Faable's bundle is a real, primary-source-verified value proposition — you're paying €65/month for a 2 vCPU deploy target and a full identity server, which is a fair trade against buying those separately. If your stack's core dependency is a relational database and you want it managed inside the same platform as your app — with AI-agent-native deploy on top — sota.io covers that half of the stack instead. Neither platform is "the EU-native PaaS that does everything"; they've bundled different, non-overlapping halves of a typical application's infrastructure list, and the honest comparison is about which half you're already paying for elsewhere.