Build and run infrastructure on free tiers. 10 DevOps categories — CI/CD, monitoring, logging, container registries, secrets management, and more. Exact limits, scaling guidance.

The Complete Free DevOps Stack

Published 2026-03-25 · Not yet reviewed

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).

Stack Overview

Category Recommended Key Limit Stability
🔄 CI/CD Pipeline GitHub Actions Free CI/CD for public repos (unlimited minutes). Private repos: 2,000 min/mo GitHub-hosted runners, 500 MB… active
📊 Monitoring & APM Grafana Cloud Free tier includes access to all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, 14-day retention, and community… active
🟢 Uptime Monitoring BetterStack Free for personal projects $0 per month Start for free 10 monitors & heartbeats, 1 status page Slack & e-mail… read 2026-09-02 active
📝 Logging & Log Management Axiom Observability platform — 500 GB ingest/month, 25 GB storage, 30-day retention, 2 datasets, 1 user, 10… active
🚨 Incident Management PagerDuty Incident management — 5 users, 1 on-call schedule, 1 escalation policy, 100 intl phone/SMS… active
📦 Container Registry GitHub Container Registry Container images currently free for both public and private repos (GitHub may change with 1-month notice)… unrated — page states no price
🖥️ Cloud Hosting & PaaS Railway 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… active
🏗️ Infrastructure as Code HCP Terraform HashiCorp managed Terraform — enhanced free tier (replacing legacy plan EOL March 31, 2026): 500 managed… unrated — page unreadable
🔐 Secrets Management Doppler Secrets management — up to 3 users, 10 projects, 4 environments per project. CLI, SDKs, and integrations… active
🐛 Error Tracking Sentry Developer tier: 1 user, 5K errors/month, 5M spans/month, 50 session replays, 5GB application logs, 1GB… active

🔄 CI/CD Pipeline

Recommended GitHub Actions Free active

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.
Full comparison guide →

📊 Monitoring & APM

Recommended Grafana Cloud Free active

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.
Full comparison guide →

🟢 Uptime Monitoring

Recommended BetterStack Free active

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.
Full comparison guide →

📝 Logging & Log Management

Recommended Axiom Personal active

500 GB ingest/month with 30-day retention — orders of magnitude more than competitors. SQL-compatible queries, dashboards, and alerting. 2 users free.

Observability platform — 500 GB ingest/month, 25 GB storage, 30-day retention, 2 datasets, 1 user, 10 GB-hrs/mo query compute, 256 fields/dataset, 3 monitors, Email/Discord notifiers only

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.

🚨 Incident Management

Recommended PagerDuty Free active

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.

Incident management — 5 users, 1 on-call schedule, 1 escalation policy, 100 intl phone/SMS notifications/month, 700+ integrations, API access

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.
Full comparison guide →

📦 Container Registry

Recommended GitHub Container Registry Free unrated — page states no price

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.

🖥️ Cloud Hosting & PaaS

Recommended Railway Free active

$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.
Full comparison guide →

🏗️ Infrastructure as Code

Recommended HCP Terraform Free (Enhanced) unrated — page unreadable

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.

🔐 Secrets Management

Recommended Doppler Free active

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.

🐛 Error Tracking

Recommended Sentry Developer active

Developer tier: 5K errors/month, 5M spans/month, 50 session replays, 5 GB attachments. Real-time error tracking with stack traces, breadcrumbs, and release tracking. 1 user free.

Developer tier: 1 user, 5K errors/month, 5M spans/month, 50 session replays, 5GB application logs, 1GB attachments

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.
Full comparison guide →

Stability Notes

Recent pricing changes affecting vendors in this stack. Based on our tracking of 476 deal changes across 1,574+ developer tools.

pricing postponed GitHub Actions: Self-hosted runner per-minute fee ($0.002/min) announced for March 2026 was postponed indefinitely after community backlash. Self-hosted ... Source ↗
pricing restructured Fly.io: Volume snapshots now billed — previously free automatic snapshots now cost $0.08/GB-month Source ↗
pricing restructured Sentry: Switched from performance units to spans-based metrics for error and performance monitoring Source ↗
pricing restructured Docker 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 restructured HCP 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 restructured Render: 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 removed Papertrail: 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 increased Amazon 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 reduced Cloudflare 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 reduced BetterStack: 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 increased StatusCake: 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 restructured Grafana Cloud: The free tier now includes access to all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, 14-day retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles,... Source ↗

View all 476 pricing changes →

Open-Source Self-Hosted Alternatives

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.
Uptime Uptime Kuma Beautiful self-hosted uptime monitoring. Unlimited monitors, 1-second intervals, notification integrations.
Logging ELK Stack Elasticsearch + Logstash + Kibana. Unlimited log ingestion, powerful full-text search, custom dashboards.
Incident Management Grafana OnCall Open-source on-call management. Integrates with Grafana, Slack, PagerDuty. Unlimited users and schedules.
Container Registry Harbor CNCF graduated container registry. RBAC, vulnerability scanning, image signing, replication. Unlimited storage.
IaC OpenTofu Open-source Terraform fork (MPL 2.0). Drop-in compatible, community-driven, no vendor lock-in.
Secrets HashiCorp Vault (OSS) Self-hosted secrets management. Dynamic secrets, encryption as a service, identity-based access.

When You'll Outgrow Free Tiers

Most solo developers and small teams can run their entire DevOps stack on free tiers. Here's what typically hits limits first:

  1. CI/CD build minutes (GitHub Actions 2,000 min/month) — large test suites and frequent deploys burn through minutes fast
  2. Monitoring metric series (Grafana Cloud 10K) — microservice architectures with many custom metrics
  3. Log retention (Axiom 30 days) — compliance requirements or debugging long-running issues need longer retention
  4. Error volume (Sentry 5K/month) — high-traffic applications with noisy error reporting
  5. 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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claude mcp add agentdeals -- npx -y agentdeals