You can build, host and monitor a real side project without paying anything. The hard part is knowing which free tiers are still worth it. Heroku, Fly.io and Railway all cut their free plans. Netlify moved to credits. Render still has a free plan, but it sleeps. Most "free for developers" lists never caught up.
This page lists 39 free tiers a working developer would actually use, grouped by job. Each one has its real limit, whether you need a card, and the catch. Every limit was checked on September 26, 2026, on the provider's own pricing or docs page.
Good to know
Last checked: September 26, 2026. Free tiers change without notice.
Quick picks
- Hosting: Cloudflare Pages and Workers are the most generous and allow commercial use. Vercel Hobby is great, but personal and non-commercial only.
- Database: Neon for Postgres that never gets deleted, Supabase for Postgres plus auth and storage (but it pauses after a week idle), Turso or Cloudflare D1 for SQLite.
- Auth: WorkOS AuthKit gives 1 million free monthly users. Clerk and Supabase Auth give 50,000.
- Monitoring: Sentry for errors, Grafana Cloud for metrics and logs, UptimeRobot for 50 free uptime monitors.
- No longer free: Fly.io needs a card and has no free allowance. Railway is a $5, 30-day trial, then $1 a month of credit.
Every free tier at a glance
Search by name, category or catch. "Catch" is what sleeps, pauses, expires or bills you.
| Service | Category | Free limit | Credit card needed? | Catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Pages | Hosting | 500 builds a month, 20,000 files per site, 100 projects | No | 1 build at a time. Pages Functions use the Workers quota |
| Cloudflare Workers | Hosting | 100,000 requests a day, 10 ms CPU per request | No | Requests fail after the daily cap until 00:00 UTC |
| Vercel Hobby | Hosting | 100 GB transfer, 1M function calls, 1M edge requests a month | No | Personal, non-commercial use only. Features pause at the cap |
| Netlify Free | Hosting | 300 credits a month (about 15 GB bandwidth or 20 deploys) | No | Hard cap. A deploy costs 15 credits |
| GitHub Pages | Hosting | 1 GB site, 100 GB a month soft bandwidth | No | Static only. No online stores or SaaS |
| Render Free | Hosting | 750 instance hours a month | No (optional) | Sleeps after 15 minutes idle. Free Postgres expires after 30 days |
| Railway | Hosting | $5 trial credit, then $1 a month | No for trial, yes after | Trial ends after 30 days |
| Supabase | Database | 500 MB database, 1 GB storage, 5 GB egress, 2 projects | No | Pauses after 1 week without activity. No backups |
| Neon | Database | 0.5 GB and 100 CU-hours per project a month, 100 projects | No | Compute stops for the month when hours or egress run out |
| Turso | Database | 100 databases, 5 GB, 500M rows read a month | No | Writes capped at 10M rows a month |
| MongoDB Atlas M0 | Database | 512 MB, 100 ops per second, 500 connections | No | Pauses after 30 days with no connections. One per project, no backups |
| Cloudflare D1 | Database | 5 GB, 5M rows read and 100,000 written a day | No | Daily caps, then queries fail |
| Cloudflare KV | Database | 1 GB, 100,000 reads a day | No | Only 1,000 writes a day |
| Upstash Redis | Database | 256 MB, 500K commands, 10 GB bandwidth a month | No | Quick-start databases are deleted after 3 days unless claimed |
| Firebase Spark | Database, auth | Firestore 1 GiB and 50K reads a day, Auth 50K MAU | No | Hosting transfer capped at 360 MB a day |
| Clerk Hobby | Auth | 50,000 monthly retained users per app | No | Fixed 7-day sessions. No MFA or passkeys |
| Supabase Auth | Auth | 50,000 monthly active users | No | Tied to a Supabase project, which can pause |
| Auth0 Free | Auth | 25,000 monthly active users, 5 organizations | No | Custom domain needs card verification |
| WorkOS AuthKit | Auth | 1,000,000 monthly active users | No | Enterprise SSO is $125 per connection |
| Resend | 3,000 emails a month, 100 a day, 3 domains | No | 100-a-day cap hits fast on launch day | |
| Mailgun Free | 100 emails a day, 1 domain | No, but sandboxed to 5 recipients without one | 1 day of logs | |
| Postmark | 100 emails a month | No | Only for testing. Next plan is $15 | |
| Sentry Developer | Monitoring | 5,000 errors, 5M spans, 50 replays a month | No | 1 user only |
| Grafana Cloud Free | Monitoring | 10,000 metric series, 50 GB each of logs, traces, profiles | No | 14-day retention, 3 users |
| Better Stack Free | Monitoring | 10 monitors, 1 status page, 3 GB logs | No | Slack and email alerts only. 3-day log retention |
| UptimeRobot Free | Monitoring | 50 monitors, 1 status page | No | Checks every 5 minutes. Pitched at hobby and non-profit use |
| Axiom Personal | Monitoring | 500 GB logs ingested a month | No | 30-day retention, fixed |
| GitHub Actions | CI | Unlimited on public repos, 2,000 minutes a month on private | No | 500 MB artifact storage. Larger runners always cost money |
| GitLab Free | CI | 400 compute minutes a month, 10 GiB storage | Maybe: phone or card check before shared runners | 5 users per top-level group |
| Cloudflare R2 | Storage | 10 GB, 1M writes and 10M reads a month | Yes, to turn R2 on | Standard storage only. Egress is free |
| Backblaze B2 | Storage | 10 GB always free | No | Free egress only up to 3x what you store |
| Cloudflare DNS | Domains | Free DNS, SSL, CDN and DDoS protection | No | You still need a domain |
| is-a.dev | Domains | Free yourname.is-a.dev subdomain | No | Manual review by pull request. Dev projects only |
| eu.org | Domains | Free subdomain under eu.org | No | Aimed at people and non-profits. No support |
| Gemini API | AI API | Gemini Flash and Flash-Lite models, 2.5 Pro | No | Limits not published. Google may use free-tier data |
| Groq | AI API | 1,000 requests and 200K tokens a day per model | No | 30 requests a minute |
| OpenRouter free models | AI API | 50 requests a day, 1,000 after buying $10 once | No | 20 requests a minute. Free models rotate |
| Workers AI | AI API | 10,000 neurons a day | No | Open models only |
| Mistral | AI API | $10 of API credit a month | No | Credit, not unlimited use |
Free tier traps to know before you build
- Things that sleep or pause: Render web services sleep after 15 minutes and take about a minute to wake. Supabase projects pause after a week idle. MongoDB Atlas M0 pauses after 30 days with no connections. Neon scales to zero after 5 minutes (fast to wake, no data lost).
- Things that expire: Render's free Postgres is deleted after 30 days plus a 14-day grace period. Railway's trial credit expires after 30 days.
- Things that need a card: Fly.io requires a card on every organization and no longer has a free allowance. Railway needs a card after the trial. Cerebras is now a 30-day trial.
- Things that can bill you: Render bills bandwidth and build overage if a card is on file. Amazon SES no longer has its own free allowance. New AWS accounts get $100 to $200 in credits on a free plan that closes after 6 months or when credits run out.
- Things that forbid business use: Vercel Hobby and GitHub Pages. If your project makes money, use Cloudflare Pages or pay.
Hosting and static sites
- Cloudflare Pages and Workers: the best free hosting today. No bandwidth limit is listed for Pages, and commercial use is allowed. Workers gives 100,000 requests a day. This site runs on Cloudflare Pages.
- Vercel Hobby: the smoothest Next.js experience, with 100 GB of transfer a month. It is for personal, non-commercial projects only, and you cannot buy extra usage on Hobby.
- Netlify: accounts created since September 4, 2025 use credits. 300 a month sounds like a lot until you see a production deploy costs 15. Frequent deployers run out fast.
- GitHub Pages: simplest option for docs and portfolios. Static files only, 1 GB per site.
- Render: the one free option here that runs a normal long-lived server (Node, Python, Go). Fine for demos, not for anything a user waits on, because it sleeps.
- Railway: now a $5 trial for 30 days, then a $1 monthly credit on the Free plan. Good for trying it, not for free hosting.
Databases
- Neon: serverless Postgres with no card and no deletion. Each project gets 0.5 GB and 100 compute hours a month, and you can have up to 100 projects. Our pick for side projects.
- Supabase: Postgres plus auth, file storage, edge functions and realtime in one project. The catch is the one-week inactivity pause, so it suits projects you touch weekly.
- Turso: hosted SQLite (libSQL) with very generous reads: 500 million rows a month across 100 databases.
- Cloudflare D1 and KV: the natural pair if you already host on Workers. D1 is SQLite with 5 GB free. KV is a key-value store, but only 1,000 writes a day.
- MongoDB Atlas: 512 MB free cluster, one per project. No backups, so export with mongodump yourself.
- Upstash Redis: serverless Redis for caches, rate limits and queues. 500,000 commands a month and no card.
- Firebase Spark: no card needed. Firestore gives 1 GiB and 50,000 reads a day. Cloud Functions need the paid Blaze plan.
Authentication
- WorkOS AuthKit: 1 million monthly active users free, far beyond anyone else. You pay only when a business customer wants enterprise SSO.
- Clerk: the fastest drop-in auth for React and Next.js. 50,000 monthly retained users per app. A user only counts if they come back at least a day after signing up.
- Supabase Auth: 50,000 monthly active users, included with any Supabase project.
- Auth0: 25,000 monthly active users, unlimited social logins and 5 organizations on the free plan.
- Resend: modern API and React Email support. 3,000 emails a month, but no more than 100 a day.
- Mailgun: the free plan still exists at 100 emails a day with one custom domain.
- Postmark: 100 emails a month that never expire. Useful for testing its excellent deliverability before paying.
We left out Brevo because its free plan limits could not be confirmed on its own site on the day we checked.
Monitoring and errors
- Sentry: 5,000 errors a month, plus tracing, 50 session replays and 5 GB of logs. One user only.
- Grafana Cloud: the most generous observability tier. 10,000 metric series and 50 GB each of logs, traces and profiles, kept for 14 days.
- Better Stack: 10 uptime monitors, a status page and 3 GB of logs. Phone and SMS alerts are paid.
- UptimeRobot: 50 monitors with 5-minute checks. The easiest "tell me when my site is down" setup.
- Axiom: 500 GB of log ingest a month on the Personal plan, kept for 30 days.
Prefer to run monitoring yourself? Uptime Kuma is free and open source. See our list of open source developer tools.
CI/CD
- GitHub Actions: free and unlimited on public repos using standard runners. Private repos get 2,000 minutes a month. Self-hosted runners are still free: a planned per-minute fee for them was postponed and has no new date.
- GitLab: 400 compute minutes a month and up to 5 users per group on GitLab.com. New accounts may be asked to verify a phone number or card before CI runs on GitLab's shared runners. Your own runner skips that check.
Storage
- Cloudflare R2: 10 GB free and no egress fees ever, which is the whole point. Every image on this site is served from R2. You have to add a card or PayPal before you can turn R2 on, even if you stay inside the free allowance.
- Backblaze B2: first 10 GB free. Egress is free up to three times your stored data, then $0.01 per GB.
Domains and DNS
- Cloudflare: free DNS with SSL, CDN and DDoS protection. For the domain itself, Cloudflare Registrar sells at cost with no markup. It is not free, and the domain must use Cloudflare nameservers.
- is-a.dev: a free
yourname.is-a.devsubdomain for developer portfolios and projects. You open a pull request and a human reviews it. AI-written requests are not welcome. - eu.org: long-running free subdomain service for people and non-profits who cannot pay registry fees. Approval can be slow.
AI APIs
- Gemini API: free access to Gemini Flash and Flash-Lite models and Gemini 2.5 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro and the image and video models are paid only. Google no longer publishes free-tier numbers; you see yours in AI Studio.
- Groq: the most generous published free quota. 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day per model, and very fast.
- OpenRouter: one key for dozens of
:freemodels. 50 requests a day, or 1,000 a day once you have bought $10 of credit. - Cloudflare Workers AI: 10,000 neurons a day for open models, callable straight from a Worker.
- Mistral: the free plan includes $10 of API credit a month.
Want to use these APIs inside a coding agent? Our guide to free AI coding agents and their real quotas covers which agents work with each one.
More free stuff
Students and open source maintainers get far more than the public free tiers: GitHub Copilot, cloud credits and paid plans at no cost. See our guides to free developer tools for students and free tools for open source maintainers.
A zero-cost stack that works
- Host on Cloudflare Pages (or Vercel if it is personal)
- Put data in Neon or Turso
- Add auth with Clerk or WorkOS AuthKit
- Send email through Resend
- Catch errors with Sentry and watch uptime with UptimeRobot
- Store files in Cloudflare R2
- Run CI on GitHub Actions
- Re-check your limits every few months
What is the best free hosting for developers?
Cloudflare Pages and Workers. Pages lists no bandwidth limit, allows commercial use and gives 500 builds a month. Workers adds 100,000 requests a day for server code. Vercel Hobby is also excellent, but only for personal, non-commercial projects.
Is Fly.io still free?
No. As of September 2026, Fly.io requires a credit card on every organization and has no free resource allowance. Its old free Hobby resources are listed as a discontinued plan. Railway also dropped its free tier for a $5, 30-day trial followed by $1 a month of credit.
Which free database does not pause or expire?
Neon, Turso and Cloudflare D1 do not pause your data. Neon scales compute to zero after 5 minutes but wakes on the next query. Supabase pauses projects after one week without activity, MongoDB Atlas M0 pauses after 30 days with no connections, and Render's free Postgres is deleted after 30 days.
Do free tiers need a credit card?
Most do not. Vercel Hobby, GitHub Pages, Neon, Turso, Clerk, Auth0, Upstash, Firebase Spark, Grafana Cloud, Better Stack and Axiom can be used with no card. Fly.io needs one, Railway needs one after its trial, and Cerebras now needs one for its trial.
What is the most generous free auth provider?
WorkOS AuthKit, with 1 million monthly active users free. Clerk and Supabase Auth give 50,000, and Auth0 gives 25,000.
Which AI API has the best free tier?
Groq has the highest published free quota: 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day per model. OpenRouter matches 1,000 requests a day after a one-time $10 purchase, and the Gemini API is free for Flash models, though Google no longer publishes the exact limits.
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Sumit
ContributorHi, I'm Sumit, Being an introvert I have always been obsessed with technology-computers and reading dozens of posts to learn, find answers out of my curiosity. I love to write as I explore more.
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