Build and run infrastructure on free tiers. 10 DevOps categories — CI/CD, monitoring, logging, container registries, secrets management, and more. Exact limits, scaling guidance.
Everything you need to build, deploy, and operate software infrastructure — without spending a dollar. This guide recommends the best free tier for each layer of a DevOps stack — 10 categories from CI/CD pipelines to secrets management — with exact limits for each. Figures in the tables below come from our records for 1,574 developer tools.
Designed for solo developers, small teams, and startups setting up their first production infrastructure. Each recommendation includes alternatives, a "when you'll outgrow it" guide, and stability notes based on our tracking of 476 real pricing changes. The limits on this page were read from vendor pricing pages between 2026-04-19 and 2026-09-24.
$0/month
Total estimated monthly cost for a solo developer or small team
$0 covers the 8 of 10 picks whose free tier our own badge still reads as active. It does not cover GitHub Container Registry (unrated — page states no price), HCP Terraform (unrated — page unreadable).
Unlimited minutes for public repos, 2,000 min/month for private repos. Native GitHub integration with 19,000+ marketplace actions. The default CI/CD for most open-source and private projects.
Free CI/CD for public repos (unlimited minutes). Private repos: 2,000 min/mo GitHub-hosted runners, 500 MB artifact storage, 10 GB cache/repo. Self-hosted runners remain free — planned $0.002/min charge was postponed…
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 2,000 private-repo minutes/month or need more than 20 concurrent jobs. GitLab CI (400 min/month) is a solid alternative with built-in container registry.
10K metric series, 50 GB logs, 50 GB traces with 14-day retention. 3 users free. The most generous free observability stack — dashboards, alerting, and tracing in one platform.
Free tier includes access to all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, 14-day retention, and community support. 10k metric series, 50 GB logs, and 50 GB traces are included. A $19/month platform fee is required for…
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 10K active metric series or need longer retention than 14 days. New Relic offers 100 GB data ingest/month with 1 full platform user — better for single-operator setups.
10 uptime monitors with 3-minute checks, incident management, and status pages. Plus 3 GB logs and 100K exceptions/month. Best all-in-one uptime + incident platform on a free tier.
Free for personal projects $0 per month Start for free 10 monitors & heartbeats, 1 status page Slack & e-mail alerts 100,000 exceptions per month 5,000 session replays 3 GB logs retained for 3 days 3 GB traces retained…read 2026-09-02
When you'll outgrow it: When you need more than 10 monitors or sub-minute check intervals. UptimeRobot offers 50 monitors free but with 5-minute intervals. Healthchecks.io is ideal for cron job monitoring specifically.
When you'll outgrow it: When you need more than 2 users or longer than 30-day retention. Grafana Cloud's 50 GB logs integrate with its metrics and traces — better if you're already using Grafana for monitoring.
Free for up to 5 users with 1 on-call schedule, 1 escalation policy, and 100 integrations. The industry standard for on-call — integrates with everything.
When you'll outgrow it: When you need more than 1 on-call schedule or more than 5 users. incident.io's free plan includes Slack-native incident workflows. BetterStack bundles uptime monitoring with on-call.
Unlimited public container images, free for public repos. Tight integration with GitHub Actions for CI/CD pipelines. No pull rate limits for authenticated users.
Container images currently free for both public and private repos (GitHub may change with 1-month notice). Non-container packages: 500 MB storage, 1 GB transfer/mo
When you'll outgrow it: When you need private container images beyond GitHub's included storage. Docker Hub allows 1 free private repo with 200 pulls per 6-hour window. For high-volume pulls, Amazon ECR Public offers 500 GB/month bandwidth.
$5/month Hobby plan with $5 credit included — effectively free for small workloads. 48 GB RAM, 48 vCPU available. Simple Git-based deploys with managed Postgres, Redis, and cron.
Free $0 per month. Start with a 30-day free trial with $5 credits, then $1 per month. Up to 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB RAM per service. 0.5 GB of volume storage. 2 replicas during the free trial, then 1. Projects: 5 during trial…
When you'll outgrow it: When your workloads exceed the $5 credit. Render's free web services (512 MB RAM, 0.1 CPU) are truly free but spin down on inactivity. Cloudflare Workers offers 100K requests/day for edge compute.
HashiCorp-managed Terraform with enhanced free tier: 500 managed resources, remote state, VCS integration, and run tasks. The standard for multi-cloud infrastructure provisioning.
HashiCorp managed Terraform — enhanced free tier (replacing legacy plan EOL March 31, 2026): 500 managed resources, unlimited users, SSO, policy as code (Sentinel + OPA), unlimited apply cycles. Legacy free plan users…
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 500 managed resources or need team collaboration features. Pulumi's free Individual plan offers unlimited projects with state management. Spacelift adds policy-as-code and drift detection.
Up to 3 users, 10 projects, 4 environments per project. CLI, SDKs, and integrations with all major platforms. The simplest secrets management with automatic rotation and sync.
Secrets management — up to 3 users, 10 projects, 4 environments per project. CLI, SDKs, and integrations included
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 3 users or 10 projects. Infisical offers 5 identities and 3 projects free with K8s operator. HashiCorp Vault (self-hosted) is unlimited but requires ops investment.
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 5K errors/month or need more than 1 user. Highlight.io offers 500 sessions + 1K errors + 1M logs bundled. BetterStack includes 100K exceptions/month in its free tier.
Recent pricing changes affecting vendors in this stack. Based on our tracking of 476 deal changes across 1,574+ developer tools.
pricing postponedGitHub Actions: Self-hosted runner per-minute fee ($0.002/min) announced for March 2026 was postponed indefinitely after community backlash. Self-hosted ... Source ↗
pricing restructuredFly.io: Volume snapshots now billed — previously free automatic snapshots now cost $0.08/GB-month Source ↗
pricing restructuredSentry: Switched from performance units to spans-based metrics for error and performance monitoring Source ↗
pricing restructuredDocker Hub: Docker Pro +80% ($5→$9/mo), Team +67% ($9→$15/mo). Free tier: Build Cloud minutes removed, Scout repos cut 3→1, private repos limited to ... Source ↗
pricing restructuredHCP Terraform: HashiCorp legacy free plan for HCP Terraform ends March 31, 2026. All legacy free plan users auto-migrated to enhanced free tier with dif... Source ↗
pricing restructuredRender: Render replaced its workspace plans. Bandwidth for the Hobby tier went from 100 GB to 5 GB included per month, then $0.15 per GB, and Hob... Source ↗
free tier removedPapertrail: Papertrail removed its $0 plan from its plans page between 2025-04-15 and 2025-04-22, replacing it with Log Observability at $5.00 per GB... Source ↗
limits increasedAmazon ECR Public: The free tier for public repositories is now 50 GB/month, up from 500 MB/month. The anonymous data transfer limit is 500 GB/month, and wi... Source ↗
limits reducedCloudflare Workers AI: On 2026-07-28 Cloudflare took Kimi K2.6, Kimi K2.7 Code and GLM-5.2 off the Workers Free plan; they now need the Workers Paid plan (or, f... Source ↗
limits reducedBetterStack: The free tier now includes 10 monitors & heartbeats, 1 status page, 100,000 exceptions per month, 5,000 session replays, 3 GB logs retain... Source ↗
limits increasedStatusCake: The free tier now includes server monitoring (3 tests) and SMS credits, but the test intervals for uptime monitoring are 5 minutes, and t... Source ↗
pricing restructuredGrafana Cloud: The free tier now includes access to all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, 14-day retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles,... Source ↗
For each category, there's an open-source option you can run on your own hardware — no limits, no vendor lock-in, complete control over your infrastructure.
Category
Tool
Details
CI/CD
Gitea Actions
GitHub Actions-compatible CI/CD built into Gitea. Self-host for unlimited minutes and runners.
Monitoring
Prometheus + Grafana
Industry-standard metrics collection and visualization. Unlimited metrics, retention, and users.
User seats (PagerDuty 5 users) — growing teams that need shared on-call rotations
The good news: the open-source alternatives above have no limits. Gitea Actions + Prometheus + Grafana + ELK Stack + Uptime Kuma gives you a complete self-hosted DevOps stack at zero ongoing cost.
Need application infrastructure too? See our Free Startup Stack for databases, auth, and email. Building AI? Check the Free AI/ML Stack. Or search our full index of 1,574+ developer deals.
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Get personalized DevOps stack recommendations from your AI assistant. Compare free tiers, check limits, and plan your infrastructure — directly in your editor.
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