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

AgentDeals › Alternatives › Free DevOps Stack

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 1,498 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 513 real pricing changes. The limits on this page were read from vendor pricing pages between 2026-04-19 and 2026-11-02.

$0/month
Total estimated monthly cost for a solo developer or small team
$0 covers the 7 of 10 picks whose free tier our own badge still reads as active. It does not cover Axiom (unrated — change not established), 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 (standard runners, unlimited minutes). Private repos on GitHub Free: $12 USD of… 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 10 uptime monitors, 3 GB logs (3-day retention), 100K exceptions/mo, 5K session replays, 30 GB metrics, 1… active
📝 Logging & Log Management Axiom Observability platform — 500 GB ingest/month, 25 GB storage, 30-day retention, 2 datasets, 1 user, 10… not confirmed · change not established · 2026-11-12 unrated — change not established
🚨 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)… not confirmed · page states no amount · 2026-10-09 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 of free credit per month. Up to 1… active
🏗️ Infrastructure as Code HCP Terraform HashiCorp managed Terraform — enhanced free tier (replacing legacy plan EOL March 31, 2026): 500 managed… not confirmed · page unreadable · 2026-11-08 unrated — page unreadable
🔐 Secrets Management Doppler Secrets management — free for 3 users, $8 a month per additional user (Doppler: "AI agents and non-human… 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 (standard runners, unlimited minutes). Private repos on GitHub Free: $12 USD of included compute a month, which is 2,000 minutes on a standard Linux runner ($0.006/min), 1,200 on Windows…

Full profile Alternatives docs.github.com/en/billing/managing-billing-for-github-actions/about-billing-for-github-actions ↗

Also consider:

GitLab CI Free active CircleCI Free active Harness CI Free active Buildkite Personal active
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. Pro costs $19 a month plus usage…

Full profile Alternatives grafana.com/pricing/ ↗

Also consider:

New Relic Free active Datadog Free active Sentry Developer active AppSignal Free at risk
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.

10 uptime monitors, 3 GB logs (3-day retention), 100K exceptions/mo, 5K session replays, 30 GB metrics, 1 status page, 1 responder

Full profile Alternatives betterstack.com/pricing ↗

Also consider:

UptimeRobot Free active StatusCake Free active Healthchecks.io Free active Cronitor Hacker unrated — change not reconciled
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 unrated — change not established

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 not confirmed · change not established · 2026-11-12

Full profile Alternatives axiom.co/pricing ↗

Also consider:

Grafana Cloud Free active Highlight.io Free OSS unrated — page states no price Baselime Free active
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

Full profile Alternatives www.pagerduty.com/pricing/ ↗

Also consider:

incident.io Basic active BetterStack Free active
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 not confirmed · page states no amount · 2026-10-09

Full profile Alternatives github.com/features/packages ↗

Also consider:

Docker Hub Personal stale Quay.io Free unrated — page states no price Amazon ECR Public Always Free unrated — page omits product
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 of free credit 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…

Full profile Alternatives railway.com/pricing ↗

Also consider:

Render Hobby active Cloudflare Workers Free active Koyeb Legacy Free unrated — not a free offer Fly.io Legacy Free unrated — not a free offer
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… not confirmed · page unreadable · 2026-11-08

Full profile Alternatives www.hashicorp.com/products/terraform/pricing ↗

Also consider:

Pulumi Individual active Spacelift Free unrated — change not established Scalr Free active
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 — free for 3 users, $8 a month per additional user (Doppler: "AI agents and non-human identities ride free"). 10 projects, 4 environments per project, 3 days of activity logs. CLI, SDKs, and…

Full profile Alternatives www.doppler.com/pricing ↗

Also consider:

Infisical Free active HashiCorp Vault Community / HCP Free unrated — page unreadable Google Secret Manager Always Free active
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

Full profile Alternatives sentry.io/pricing/ ↗

Also consider:

Highlight.io Free OSS unrated — page states no price BetterStack Free active AppSignal Free at risk
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 513 deal changes across 1,498+ developer tools.

pricing restructured Fly.io: Fly.io raised the price of memory on Machines to $6.00 per GB a month, from about $5, and left CPU prices unchanged. Every preset include... Source ↗
new free tier Railway: Railway added a free VM accessible via `ssh railway.new` with no account or credit card needed. Each VM has 2 vCPU / 2 GB, preinstalled c... Source ↗
limits increased Cloudflare Workers: On September 4, 2026, Cloudflare removed the compressed Worker size limits of 3 MB on Workers Free and 10 MB on Workers Paid. A Worker on... 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 increased UptimeRobot: UptimeRobot's terms stopped limiting the Free plan to personal, non-commercial use between 2026-06-08 and 2026-06-11. The terms now allow... 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 ↗
limits reduced Grafana Cloud: On 2026-04-20, Grafana Cloud restricted new Free and Trial accounts. Email alerts and reports can only go to users of their own Grafana i... Source ↗
limits reduced Grafana Cloud: On 2026-04-07, Grafana Cloud introduced a hard limit of 1,000 dashboards and 1,000 folders per free tier stack. Stacks already above thes... Source ↗
pricing restructured HCP Terraform: HashiCorp's legacy free plan for HCP Terraform reached end of life on March 31, 2026. Legacy free plan users were auto-migrated to the en... Source ↗
free tier removed Koyeb: Koyeb withdrew its free Starter plan from new users after announcing on 2026-02-17 that it is joining Mistral AI: new users "must subscri... Source ↗
pricing restructured Fly.io: From January 2026 Fly.io bills volume snapshot storage at $0.08/GB a month after the first 10 GB free each month; automatic snapshots wer... Source ↗
pricing postponed GitHub Actions: On 2025-12-17 GitHub postponed the $0.002-a-minute charge for self-hosted Actions runners that it had announced the day before for 2026-0... Source ↗

View all 513 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 1,498+ developer deals.

More Alternatives Guides

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