# Every hosting provider's free tier, side by side (checked September 2026) > Hosting free tiers compared: Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, Render, Railway, Fly.io, Heroku, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and VPS hosts, checked September 2026. Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2026-09-23 | Topics: [Web Platform](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/platform/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/hosting-free-tiers/ This is what each hosting provider gives you for $0, what it holds back, and who each free tier is good for. I checked every number below on September 16, 2026 against the provider's own pricing page or docs. If a number isn't here, I couldn't confirm it that day. Free tiers moved a lot in the last few years. Heroku ended its free plans on November 28, 2022. Fly.io has no monthly free allowance anymore, only a short trial. Netlify bills through credits, and a production deploy eats some of them. AWS hands new accounts credits that expire instead of a year of free services. If your project will cost money at some point, read [where to host your web app](https://flaviocopes.com/where-to-host/) first. This post is only about the $0 column. ## The table | Provider | Type | What you get for $0 | Biggest catch | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Cloudflare Workers and Pages | Static and serverless | Unlimited static requests and bandwidth, 100,000 Worker requests a day, 3,000 build minutes a month | 10 ms of CPU per request, errors past the daily cap | | Vercel Hobby | Static and serverless | 100 GB transfer, 1M edge requests, 1M function invocations, 4 CPU hours a month | Personal, non-commercial use only | | Netlify Free | Static and serverless | 300 credits a month, custom domains with SSL, unlimited deploy previews | A production deploy costs 15 credits; one project over the limit pauses the whole account | | Deno Deploy Free | Serverless | 1M requests, 20 GiB egress, 10 CPU hours, 5 custom domains, 10 apps | One day of logs, no wildcard domains | | DigitalOcean App Platform | Static only | 3 static-site apps, 1 GiB of transfer each | Anything with a process starts at $5 a month | | Render | PaaS | Free static sites, a 512 MB web service for 750 hours a month, a 1 GB Postgres for 30 days, 5 GB bandwidth | Web services sleep after 15 idle minutes and take a minute to wake | | Railway | PaaS | $5 of trial credit for 30 days, then $1 of usage a month | $1 keeps nothing running all month | | Fly.io | PaaS | A 7-day trial with 2 hours of machine runtime | Then a card is required, no free allowance | | Heroku | PaaS | Nothing since November 2022 | Eco dynos are $5 a month and sleep after 30 minutes | | Laravel Cloud | PaaS | First month of Starter free, then $5 a month with $5 of usage credit | Free for one month | | Google Cloud Run | Serverless containers | Always free: 2M requests, 180,000 vCPU-seconds, 360,000 GB-seconds a month, plus $300 for 90 days | Card required; a budget alone doesn't stop spending | | AWS | Cloud | Up to $200 in credits over 6 months, plus always-free services such as Lambda | Payment method required; the free-plan account closes after 6 months | | Azure | Cloud | $200 for 30 days, 12 months of some services, App Service F1 and Static Web Apps Free forever | F1 gets 60 CPU minutes a day and isn't supported for production | | VPS providers | Servers | No free tier anywhere, signup credits at most | You pay from the first hour | ## Cloudflare Workers and Pages The most generous free tier on the list, and the one this site runs on. Requests to static assets are free and unlimited on every plan. This blog is more than 2,000 posts built by Astro, and none of those page views count toward any quota. Only requests that run code count: 100,000 a day on the Workers Free plan, shared between Workers and Pages Functions, with 10 milliseconds of CPU each. Past the limit Cloudflare returns Error 1027 until midnight UTC. Pages gives the free plan 500 builds a month, 100 custom domains per project, 20,000 files per site and unlimited preview deployments. KV reads are capped at 100,000 a day, and D1, R2 and Durable Objects have their own free limits. No credit card is required to start. Here the server-side code is five Pages Functions: the purchase webhook, the course access form, the newsletter signup, the sponsor form and one AI-assisted tool. That fits in the free plan with room to spare. The one time a feature needed the Cloudflare Pro plan (serving Markdown to AI agents at the zone level), I did it another way. The full list is in [the Cloudflare products I actually use](https://flaviocopes.com/cloudflare-products-i-use/). One gotcha: with `run_worker_first` in a static assets project, matching requests always invoke the Worker, and past the free limit they get a 429 instead of falling back to the files. Start with [Cloudflare Workers: your first serverless function](https://flaviocopes.com/cloudflare-workers/) and [serving a website with Workers static assets](https://flaviocopes.com/cloudflare-workers-static-assets/), or take the [free Cloudflare course](https://flaviocopes.com/courses/cloudflare/). ## Vercel Hobby The numbers are in the table. The catch is in Vercel's own words: "the Hobby plan restricts users to non-commercial, personal use only." A blog with ads or a client site belongs on Pro, $20 a month with $20 of usage credit included. There's no overage on Hobby. When an allowance runs out the feature pauses and you wait 30 days before using it again. You get 200 projects, 100 deployments a day and 50 domains per project. I wrote up the deploy flow in the [Vercel tutorial](https://flaviocopes.com/vercel/). Good for personal projects and for learning Next.js. ## Netlify Free 300 credits a month with a hard limit that, in Netlify's words, "cannot be exceeded or incur any costs." What they buy: a production deploy costs 15 credits, 1 GB of bandwidth 20, 10,000 web requests 2, 1 GB-hour of function compute 10. Previews and branch deploys are free. So 300 credits is 20 production deploys with zero traffic, or 15 GB of bandwidth with zero deploys. A blog that publishes daily runs out on deploys alone. If one project goes over, every project on the account pauses until the next cycle. New projects start private until you publish them, and the plan is limited to one member. Personal is $9 for 1,000 credits, Pro $20 for 3,000. This site ran on Netlify for years. In June 2026 I moved it to Cloudflare Pages, because the site is about 99% static and Cloudflare already handled its DNS. The full stack after that move is in [the stack I use to run this blog, 2026 edition](https://flaviocopes.com/blog-stack-2026/). I covered Netlify's edge functions in [how to use Netlify Edge Functions](https://flaviocopes.com/netlify-edge-functions/). Good for small sites that deploy a few times a month. ## Deno Deploy Free For "personal use and smaller projects", and more than it looks. Beyond the table numbers you get 150 GiB-hours of memory time, 10 GiB of revision storage and a 1 GiB Deno KV database with 1,000,000 reads and 500,000 writes a month. Memory is billed at 768 MB for every second the app is loaded, and idle apps shut down after 20 to 30 seconds. A low-traffic app spends most of the month scaled to zero, so the allowance goes a long way. It runs Deno, not Node, so npm packages work but some frameworks need a Deno-specific setup step. Pro is $20 for 5M requests, 200 GiB and 50 CPU hours. Good for TypeScript APIs that want a KV store without paying for a database. ## DigitalOcean App Platform Free means static sites only: 3 apps with 1 GiB of transfer each, deployed from GitHub or GitLab with HTTPS, a custom domain and a CDN. Extra static apps are $3. Add a web service, worker or job and the app becomes paid, from $5 a month for 1 vCPU and 512 MiB. Good for a couple of static sites on an account you already use for Droplets. ## Render The most you get for free among container platforms, with the docs saying plainly: "Do not use them for production applications." A free web service gets 512 MB of RAM and less than one CPU, from a pool of 750 instance hours per workspace per month. It spins down after 15 minutes without traffic and takes about a minute to come back, showing a loading page. The filesystem is ephemeral. Free Postgres is 1 GB, one per workspace, and expires 30 days after creation with 14 days of grace to upgrade. The Hobby workspace includes 25 services, 5 GB of bandwidth (then $0.15 per GB), 2 custom domains and 500 build minutes. Without a payment method on file, Render suspends your free services when the bandwidth runs out rather than billing you. Paid starts at $7 for a web service and $6 for Postgres. Good for trying a stack or a demo you show once. ## Railway A trial, then a very small Free plan. New users get 30 days and a one-time $5 credit, spent at the normal rates: $10 per GB of RAM per month, $20 per vCPU per month, $0.05 per GB of egress. If Railway can verify your GitHub account you get the full trial; otherwise the Limited Trial deploys code and databases but restricts network access. Then the Free plan: $1 of credit a month, no rollover, one replica with 0.5 GB of RAM and 1 vCPU per service. At $10 per GB-month, $1 keeps about 100 MB of RAM alive for a month, which covers a cron job and little else. The realistic entry point is Hobby at $5 a month with $5 of usage included. If you want to try it, [sign up through my referral link](https://flaviocopes.com/go/railway). That's an affiliate link: you get signup credit and I get a commission if you become a paying customer. ## Fly.io Fly.io used to include a monthly free allowance. It doesn't anymore. The trial is 2 hours of total machine runtime or 7 days, whichever comes first, with at most 10 machines and 20 GB of volumes, and trial machines stop after 5 minutes of running. Hit any limit and your apps stop until you add a payment method. The pricing page says all organizations require a credit card on file. The paid prices are why Fly still comes up here: a `shared-cpu-1x` machine with 256 MB costs about $2 a month if it runs all the time ($1.94, and $2.19 from October 1, 2026, when Fly raises the price of RAM from $5 to $6 per GB per month), and egress is $0.02 per GB in North America and Europe. ## Heroku Free dynos, free Postgres and the free Key-Value Store were removed starting November 28, 2022. The cheapest option is Eco at $5 a month: a pool of 1,000 dyno hours shared by every Eco dyno in your account, 512 MB each, sleeping after 30 minutes of inactivity, personal accounts only. When the pool is gone all your Eco dynos sleep for the rest of the month and you can't buy more. Basic dynos are $7 and stay on. The smallest Postgres is $5 for 1 GB. Good for people who already know the workflow. Everyone else gets more for $5 elsewhere. ## Laravel Cloud Starter is $5 a month plus usage, with the first month free and $5 of monthly usage credit on every plan. Flex compute bills per second while the app is awake and scales to zero when it isn't, and the managed databases sleep too, so a tiny app costs exactly the plan fee. You can set spending limits. Starter includes 10 custom domains and one day of logs; Growth is $20 with autoscaling and preview environments. Symfony apps are supported on the same infrastructure. Good for a Laravel side project. Free for a month, then $5. ## AWS, Google Cloud and Azure Each big cloud has two separate things: a time-limited offer for new accounts, and services that stay free within monthly limits for as long as you're a customer. AWS gives new accounts $100 at signup and up to $100 more as you try selected services, on a Free plan that closes on its own after 6 months or when the credits run out. You won't be charged unless you upgrade to a Paid plan or turn on a paid-only service, but a valid payment method is required at signup for identity verification. The always-free service web developers care about is Lambda: 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds a month. Google Cloud gives new customers $300 over 90 days. A credit card or another valid payment method is required, and if you don't upgrade before the credit or the days run out, the trial account closes and its resources stop. The always-free tier is the good part. Cloud Run gets the numbers in the table plus 1 GB of outbound transfer from North America, Cloud Run functions get 2 million invocations, and you get one `e2-micro` VM a month in `us-west1`, `us-central1` or `us-east1`. One thing to know before you deploy: an alerts-only budget doesn't cap usage or spending, it only emails you. A real stop means wiring a budget notification to something that disables billing on the project. Azure gives new customers $200 to use within 30 days, then you move to pay-as-you-go. Signup needs a phone number and a credit or non-prepaid debit card. New customers get 20+ services free for 12 months, and everyone gets 65+ always-free services. Two matter here. App Service F1: 60 CPU minutes a day, 1 GB of RAM, and "use of free plan for production workloads is not supported." Static Web Apps Free: 100 GB of bandwidth per subscription, 2 custom domains per app, free SSL and 1 million free Azure Functions executions. Cloud Run's always-free tier is the best of the three for a small container, if you're disciplined about billing. The AWS and Azure credits are for learning the platform. ## VPS providers: no free tier, credits at most None of the VPS providers a web developer would normally consider has a free tier. Not DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode, Scaleway, OVHcloud, Contabo or netcup. A server bills from the first hour, and a powered-off server usually keeps billing until you destroy it (DigitalOcean's docs say so in as many words). DigitalOcean's pricing page says it "often provides promotional credits for new users" without fixing an amount. Droplets start at $4 a month for 1 vCPU, 512 MiB and 500 GiB of transfer, and $6 for 1 GiB. I run Plausible and Sendy on DigitalOcean Droplets, so it's the one I'd point you to for a first server: [sign up for DigitalOcean through my link](https://flaviocopes.com/go/digitalocean) and you start with signup credit. That's an affiliate link, and I get DigitalOcean credit if you become a customer. The walkthrough is [how to create your first VPS on DigitalOcean](https://flaviocopes.com/digitalocean-create-vps/). Vultr is a strange case. Its public API lists a plan called `vc2-1c-0.5gb-free` at $0 with 1 vCPU, 512 MB and 10 GB of disk, but it isn't something you can count on getting. Paid plans start at $2.50 for an IPv6-only 512 MB server, $3.50 with IPv4, and $5 for 1 GB of RAM. Linode (Akamai) starts at the Nanode 1GB, $5 a month for 1 GB of RAM and 1,000 GB of transfer. Scaleway has no free tier but runs startup programs with credits (the Founders Program offers up to €1,000 over a year). Its cheapest instance, the Stardust, is about €0.43 a month for 1 vCPU and 1 GB; the DEV1-S with 2 vCPUs and 2 GB is about €6.55. Storage and a public IPv4 are extra. OVHcloud's VPS-1 is "from $4.54 a month" for 2 vCores, 4 GB of RAM and unlimited traffic at 500 Mbps. It's a "from" price, so check which term it assumes at checkout, and Asia-Pacific locations have traffic quotas instead of unlimited. Contabo's Cloud VPS 4 is €5.50 a month including VAT for 4 vCPU cores, 8 GB of RAM and 100 GB of SSD, a promotional price for the first 24 months. netcup's VPS 500 G12 is €0.010 an hour or from €5.91 a month including 19% German VAT, for 2 vCores, 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of NVMe. Hetzner has no free tier either. So nothing at $0, but the cheapest real server is $4 to €6 a month, less than most platforms' first paid tier, and it never sleeps. ## Which ones ask for a card No payment method needed to start: Cloudflare (its Workers page says "no credit card required"), Render (free services run without one, and it suspends rather than bills), and Railway's trial (it verifies you through GitHub). Card or payment method up front: AWS (for identity verification, not charged on the Free plan), Google Cloud, Azure (plus a phone number), Fly.io once the 7-day trial ends, and every VPS provider. Heroku and Laravel Cloud are paid plans, so a card is part of signing up. ## Which free tier for which project For a static site or a blog, Cloudflare Pages or Workers. Static requests don't count against anything and there's no card involved. Netlify is a fine second choice if you deploy fewer than about 20 times a month, Vercel Hobby if the site is personal and makes no money. For a small API or full-stack app that can afford to sleep, Deno Deploy's free plan is the most complete package. Render works if a one-minute cold start is acceptable. Cloud Run gives the most compute, inside Google's billing system. For anything commercial, cross off Vercel Hobby (non-commercial only) and Azure F1 (not for production). Cloudflare, Netlify and Cloud Run don't restrict their free plans to personal use. For a database, the free options are thin: Render's Postgres expires in 30 days and Deno KV gives you 1 GiB. The cheapest managed Postgres here is $5 to $6 a month at Heroku or Render. For anything that must stay awake, nobody gives you that for free in September 2026. Fly at about $2, Vultr at $3.50, DigitalOcean at $4, Heroku Eco or Railway Hobby at $5: that's the floor, and I compared those paid tiers in [what's the best platform to deploy your projects](https://flaviocopes.com/which-platform-to-deploy/) and in [where to host your web app](https://flaviocopes.com/where-to-host/). My own setup follows that split. The site is static, so it sits on Cloudflare's free plan and costs nothing. Plausible and Sendy need a process that never sleeps and a disk that keeps its data, so they live on DigitalOcean Droplets I pay for every month. The moment a project needs to stay up or keep data past 30 days, $4 to $7 a month is the honest price, and I'd rather pay it than fight a free plan's limits.