What's the best platform to deploy your projects?

You’ve built your awesome application.

Now it’s time to put it on the Internet, so everyone can look in wonder at the result of your craft.

Here’s the question though: where?

Where should you deploy your app?

There are many different options, and it all depends on the scope of the project, it’s ambition, and how much you want to spend.

For a fuller take with current prices and tradeoffs across static hosts, PaaS, and VPS, see Where to host your web app.

Let’s start with the “toy project” options, also perfect for demos and just trying out stuff.

One option is Replit. It’s like a playground. Replit gives you unlimited apps. However, each one is limited in its resources usage (CPU, RAM) - but it’s good for test projects. And each app gets a dedicated URL on the repl.co subdomain.

You can start with pre-made templates, install packages, work with any programming language Python Node Java C# Bash whatever It’s easy to fork other people’s repls too

StackBlitz and CodeSandbox are two more browser playgrounds, great for front-end demos. Instant browser IDE, share a link, done.

Glitch used to be another great playground for Node.js apps and simple sites. Hosting ended on July 8, 2025, so you can’t start new projects there. I kept the post as a record of what it was.

I would use one of those for quick demos and to provide a playground for my tutorials.

Now a few other options for things that are more serious.

One option is Vercel. Vercel is less of a playground and more of a serious option. Their hobby plan is generous and you get a nice subdomain too, vercel.app. This works especially great if you use Next.js, as they made it.

One option is Netlify I recommend Netlify to host static sites. They have a great free plan. No classic long-running backend, but you can use functions for serverless work. Pretty cool.

One option is Cloudflare. Pages works great for static sites, this blog runs on it. For new projects Cloudflare now points you to Workers with static assets, which gives you a backend in the same deploy. Static assets are served free on both, with no bandwidth cap.

One option is Railway. (That’s my referral link: sign up through it and you get $20 in Railway credit, and I get a 15% commission on what you pay in your first year.) They have a free plan with $1 of usage credit a month, plus a one-time $5 trial credit (checked September 2026). You can run a few services on it, I find their database offering quite intuitive and they have templates for modern apps using SvelteKit, Next, Vite, but also Rails, Discord bots, Nuxt…

Now it’s time to talk about more complete solutions.

One option is Render. Their Hobby workspace is free: static sites, a free web service that spins down after 15 minutes without traffic, and a free Postgres database that expires after 30 days (checked September 2026). Good to try things out, not for production.

One option is Supabase. The free plan gives you a 500 MB Postgres database, 1 GB of file storage and 5 GB of egress, and free projects pause after a week without activity (checked September 2026). They really have a complete offering to build real apps. If you outgrow the free plan you can self host too.

One option is Firebase it has a free plan, access to database, authentication, pretty cool! Made by Google

One option is Fly.io. There is no free plan anymore, only a short trial (2 hours of machine time or 7 days, whichever comes first, checked September 2026), then you add a card and pay for what you use. Fly allows you to build really cool apps with all their services which include database, load balancing, monorepos, etc etc

Those are all hosted options.

Another option is to use your own VPS.

A VPS is your own server. Running Linux. You can do whatever you want with it.

However, this requires a bigger effort. But you also learn valuable skills that you can reuse later.

DigitalOcean is my favorite VPS provider. Their basic plan starts at $4/m and with this you can do anything you want, including 500GB of traffic, database, etc.

I use DigitalOcean for tons of projects myself.

Sign up for DigitalOcean with my referral link and you get $200 in credit for 60 days, so the first 2 months are free. This is an affiliate link: if you sign up through it and then spend $25, I get $25 in DigitalOcean credit.

You can also get your own referral code and when your friends sign up you get free credits.

You can get a VPS from tons and tons of other services, also cheaper. I just find DO very complete in their offer.

Dokku or CapRover are cool projects that help you manage your VPS.

Tons of other platforms exist, but I hope this list can point you in the right direction when it’s time for the ultimate question: what’s the best platform to deploy my projects?

If you want to compare all the free plans in one place, I built a free free tier finder that filters the $0 tiers based on what your app needs, and I went through them one by one in this post on hosting free tiers.

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