These are the rough steps for getting a surrealdb instance running on fly.io and connecting to it. This is heavily based off of steps posted in the surrealdb discord by rvdende. View Origional Post.
These steps work just fine for the hobby (pay as you go) plan.
HEADS UP By default this will create an instance on a single shared cpu with 256m memory. This is pretty darn small to do anything but experiment, but its free. You can scale your instance to something more useable by visiting the https://fly.io/apps/<appname>/scale
. Obviously scaling to larger instances will incur higher costs, please refer to fly.io pricing
source: fly.io docs