Everything you need to build and ship a FastAPI app — without spending a dollar. This guide recommends the best free tier for each layer of your FastAPI infrastructure — 10 layers from ASGI hosting to API documentation — with exact limits for each. 15 of 33 figures in the tables below come from our records for 1,580 developer tools.
Designed for Python developers building REST APIs, AI/ML serving endpoints, microservices, and async backend services with FastAPI. Each recommendation includes alternatives, a "when you'll outgrow it" guide, "why not X" callouts for popular-but-not-recommended options, and stability notes based on our tracking of 424 real pricing changes. The limits on this page were read from vendor pricing pages between 2026-08-11 and 2026-10-04.
$0/month
Total infrastructure cost for a FastAPI service on free tiers
$0 covers all 8 picks: our own badge reads every one of their free tiers as active.
🧩 Choose Your Own Stack — FastAPI's Unbundled Architecture
Unlike Django's batteries-included approach, FastAPI gives you a fast async framework and lets you pick every other component. More decisions, but each choice is optimized for your use case. This guide resolves that decision fatigue.
Its Free plan opens with a 30-day trial carrying $5 of credits, then $1 of free credit a month, with uvicorn ASGI server, auto-deploy from GitHub, and managed add-ons. Nixpacks auto-detects Python projects — just add a Procfile with `web: uvicorn main:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port $PORT`. No sleep timer — your API stays warm for consistent response times.
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 you exceed the $5 of usage that Hobby's $5/month includes (usually 1-2 services). Render's free tier spins down after 15 minutes of inactivity — cold starts of about one minute kill API latency. Fly.io has no free tier for new accounts (legacy accounts retain 3 shared VMs). Koyeb has had no free plan for new users since February 2026 (Pro from $29/mo).
⚠️ Why not Vercel: Vercel supports FastAPI via serverless functions (Mangum adapter), but loses WebSocket support, background tasks, and startup events — core FastAPI features. Why not Deta Space: Deta shut down Space in 2024. Many FastAPI tutorials still reference it — those guides are outdated.
Serverless Postgres with native async support. Free plan: 1 GB of storage and 100 CU-hours per project, up to 100 projects and 20 GB of storage in total, scales to zero after 5 minutes idle. Use with asyncpg for async queries or SQLAlchemy 2.0's async engine. Neon's connection pooler handles FastAPI's concurrent async connections efficiently. Branching lets you test schema changes safely.
Serverless Postgres with branching — free tier includes 100 CU-hours/month per project, 1 GB of Postgres storage per project (20 GB total across all projects), up to 100 projects, 10 branches per project, Neon Auth (60K…
No longer a free-tier pick: CockroachDB — free tier removed.
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 1 GB of storage. Supabase offers 500 MB Postgres with built-in auth and realtime subscriptions, but pauses after 7 days inactive.
⚠️ Why not MongoDB Atlas: FastAPI works with MongoDB (via Motor or Beanie ODM), but most FastAPI tutorials and the ecosystem assume relational data with Pydantic models mapping to SQL tables. Postgres + SQLAlchemy is the mainstream path. Why not SQLite: Most free hosting uses ephemeral filesystems — your database would be wiped on every deploy.
Serverless Redis with async support. Free tier: 500K commands/month, 256 MB storage. FastAPI's async architecture pairs perfectly with Upstash's REST API or the async redis-py client. Use for response caching (fastapi-cache2), rate limiting (slowapi), and session storage. Pay-per-request pricing means you only pay beyond free limits.
Serverless Redis — 500K commands/month (256MB data). Vector: 200M vectors × dimensions and 10K queries a day free. QStash: 1,000 messages/day free
Free Redis databases unused for at least 30 days are archived after warning emails. Their data is backed up and can be restored into a new database from the console. (From upstash.com/docs/redis/help/faq, read 2026-10-06.)
Entering a credit card upgrades a Redis database to pay-as-you-go. Paid databases are charged by their plan and do not get free 256MB data or 500K commands. (From upstash.com/pricing, read 2026-10-06.)
A Redis database created with no account by a POST request to upstash.com/start-redis is deleted after 3 days unless it is claimed into an account from the console link in the response. (From upstash.com/pricing, read 2026-10-06.)
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 500K commands/month. Redis Cloud offers 30 MB free with unlimited commands — better for high-throughput caching. For simple caching without Redis, fastapi-cache2 supports in-memory backends, but these don't persist across deploys.
25,000 MAU free — the most generous managed auth tier. FastAPI has no built-in auth (unlike Django), so you need an external provider or roll your own. Auth0's Python SDK + FastAPI dependency injection pattern works cleanly: create a dependency that validates JWTs, inject it into protected routes. Social login, MFA, and RBAC included on free tier.
Identity platform — 25K MAU (B2C), unlimited logins, social + database connections, Universal Login, 1 Enterprise Connection, 5 Organizations, 1 Custom Domain. No credit card required
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 25,000 MAU or need advanced enterprise features. Clerk offers 10,000 MAU free with pre-built UI components (less useful for API-only FastAPI). Supabase Auth gives 50,000 MAU free if you're already using Supabase for your database. For API-only services, rolling your own with python-jose + passlib + OAuth2PasswordBearer is viable but more work.
⚠️ Why not rolling your own from scratch: FastAPI's security utilities (OAuth2PasswordBearer, HTTPBearer) make it tempting, but you'll end up reimplementing password reset flows, email verification, rate limiting, and session management. Auth0 handles all of this on free tier. Only roll your own for simple API-key auth or internal services.
Zero egress fees — the standout differentiator. 10 GB storage, 1 million Class A operations, 10 million Class B operations per month. S3-compatible API means boto3 and aioboto3 work directly. FastAPI's UploadFile with async streaming to R2 handles file uploads efficiently without buffering entire files in memory.
Object storage with zero egress fees — 10 GB storage, 1M writes, 10M reads/month free.
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 10 GB storage. At scale, R2 saves dramatically vs S3: 1 TB stored + 10 TB egress costs ~$15/month on R2 vs ~$925/month on S3. Backblaze B2 offers 10 GB free and free egress up to 3x what you store, no CDN required. Supabase Storage gives 1 GB free with image transformations.
⚠️ Why not AWS S3: new accounts get no free storage, only Free plan credits that last at most 6 months; then storage costs $0.023/GB-month. Bandwidth is the part that does not expire — AWS S3 gives every account its first 100 GB of internet egress each month free, on an account of any age — so an API serving under 100 GB of pre-signed downloads a month pays nothing for egress on S3 either. Past that S3 charges $0.09/GB and R2 still charges $0.
Modern developer-first email API. 3,000 emails/month, 100/day on free tier. Clean REST API — call directly with httpx (FastAPI's recommended HTTP client) or the official Python SDK. No framework-specific adapter needed unlike Django. Domain verification, webhook delivery tracking, and React Email templates if you have a frontend.
Developer-first email API — 3K emails/month free (100/day cap), 3 domains, 1K marketing contacts/month, 5 AI credits, 30-day data retention
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 3,000 emails/month or 100/day. Brevo gives 300 emails/day (9,000/month) with marketing automation. Amazon SES has no free tier since July 16, 2025 but at $0.10/1K is the cheapest at scale for high-volume transactional email.
⚠️ Why not SendGrid: Free tier removed May 2025. Many Python API tutorials still reference SendGrid — those guides are outdated.
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 5,000 errors/month or need more than 1 team member. BetterStack combines uptime monitoring (10 monitors) with incident management — useful for API health checks. Grafana Cloud offers 10,000 series metrics + 50 GB logs + 50 GB traces — great for full observability beyond error tracking.
⚠️ Why not Datadog: Free tier has only 1-day metric retention — practically unusable for debugging. Per-host pricing ($15/host/month) gets expensive fast for containerized FastAPI deployments.
2,000 minutes/month on free tier for public repos (unlimited) and private repos. FastAPI testing integrates naturally — run pytest with httpx.AsyncClient for async endpoint tests. Matrix testing across Python 3.10-3.13 catches compatibility issues. Caching pip dependencies + virtual envs cuts CI time by 50-70%.
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 minutes/month on private repos. Railway and Render auto-deploy from git with zero CI config — combine with GitHub Actions for tests only.
FastAPI offers three tiers of background task support. (1) Built-in BackgroundTasks: free, zero dependencies, runs in the same process — perfect for fire-and-forget tasks like sending emails or logging. (2) ARQ + Upstash Redis: async-native task queue built for asyncio — natural fit for FastAPI's async architecture. (3) Celery + Upstash Redis: battle-tested but synchronous — use when you need periodic tasks (Celery Beat) or complex task chains. Upstash's 500K commands/month covers moderate task queue usage for both ARQ and Celery.
Serverless Redis — 500K commands/month (256MB data). Vector: 200M vectors × dimensions and 10K queries a day free. QStash: 1,000 messages/day free
Free Redis databases unused for at least 30 days are archived after warning emails. Their data is backed up and can be restored into a new database from the console. (From upstash.com/docs/redis/help/faq, read 2026-10-06.)
Entering a credit card upgrades a Redis database to pay-as-you-go. Paid databases are charged by their plan and do not get free 256MB data or 500K commands. (From upstash.com/pricing, read 2026-10-06.)
A Redis database created with no account by a POST request to upstash.com/start-redis is deleted after 3 days unless it is claimed into an account from the console link in the response. (From upstash.com/pricing, read 2026-10-06.)
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 500,000 Redis commands a month or need more than a single worker process. Redis Cloud's 30 MB free with unlimited commands is better for high-throughput task queues. For simple use cases, FastAPI's built-in BackgroundTasks requires no external service at all.
⚠️ Why not Celery as default: Celery is synchronous — it doesn't leverage FastAPI's async runtime. ARQ is async-native and lighter weight. Use Celery only when you need its advanced features (Beat scheduling, canvas chains, result backends). Why not Dramatiq: Similar to Celery but less ecosystem support and fewer production deployments.
📖 API Documentation
RecommendedFastAPI Built-inFree (included)
FastAPI's killer feature — automatic OpenAPI (Swagger UI + ReDoc) documentation generated from your type hints and Pydantic models. Zero config, zero cost, always in sync with your code. Access at /docs (Swagger UI) and /redoc (ReDoc). Add response_model, description, tags, and examples to your route decorators for rich, interactive docs that clients can test directly.
Automatic Swagger UI + ReDoc from type hints. Zero config, zero cost.
When you'll outgrow it: You won't outgrow FastAPI's built-in docs — they scale with your API. For API gateway features (rate limiting, API keys, analytics), Zuplo offers a free tier with 500K requests/month and auto-generated developer portals from your OpenAPI spec.
Stability Notes
Recent pricing changes affecting vendors in this stack. Based on our tracking of 424 deal changes across 1,580+ developer tools.
limits increasedNeon: Neon raised the Free plan's Postgres storage from 0.5 GB to 1 GB per project and added a limit of 20 GB across all of an account's projects. Source ↗
pricing restructuredFly.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 ↗
free tier removedCockroachDB: CockroachDB stopped offering its free Basic plan (50 million RUs and 10 GiB of storage free per month) to new deployments on 2026-09-15, ... 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 ↗
limits increasedNeon: Neon's Free plan went from one member per organization to unlimited members. Source ↗
free tier removedKoyeb: 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 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 ↗
limits increasedNeon: Neon raised the Free plan's project limit from 80 to 100, the last of seven increases since 2025-08-29, when the limit was 10. Source ↗
limits increasedNeon: Neon made Neon Auth available on all plans, including Free. Source ↗
limits increasedAuth0: Auth0 increased free tier from 7,500 to 25,000 monthly active users. Largest free tier expansion since Okta acquisition. Makes Auth0 comp... Source ↗
limits increasedNeon: Neon doubled the Free plan's compute from 50 to 100 CU-hours per project a month. Source ↗
When you're ready to spend your first dollar, here's where it matters most. Sorted by which limits you'll likely hit first:
Layer
Free Limit
First Paid Plan
What You Get
Database ⬆ hit first
1 GB storage per project
Launch, usage-based
$0.106/CU-hour, $0.35/GB-month, autoscaling up to 16 CU
Hosting ⬆ hit first
$1 of free credit a month after 30-day $5 trial
Hobby $5/mo
$5 of usage included, no sleep, more RAM
Cache/Redis
500K cmds/mo
Pay-as-you-go $0.2/100K
Unlimited commands, 1 GB storage
Auth
25,000 MAU
Essential $35/mo
Custom domains, roles, MFA policies
Email
3,000 emails/mo
Pro $20/mo
50,000 emails/mo, custom domains, analytics
Storage
10 GB
$0.015/GB/mo
Unlimited storage, still zero egress
Monitoring
5,000 errors/mo
Team $26/mo
50,000 errors, unlimited members, integrations
Background Tasks
500K cmds/mo
Pay-as-you-go $0.2/100K
Unlimited task dispatches
API Docs
Unlimited
Free forever
N/A — scales with your API
CI/CD
2,000 min/mo
Team $4/user/mo
3,000 min/mo, required reviewers
The first paid upgrade: Database (Neon Launch, usage-based, no monthly minimum) is the first upgrade that matters — storage beyond 1 GB at $0.35/GB-month and autoscaling up to 16 CU. Everything else — auth (25K MAU on Auth0), email (3K/mo), monitoring (5K errors), cache/Redis (500K cmds/mo), storage (10 GB R2), API docs (unlimited built-in), CI (2,000 min) — stays free well past your first 1,000 users. FastAPI's lightweight footprint means hosting costs stay lower than Django for the same traffic.
All connections use async HTTPS — no VPCs, no SSH tunnels, no complex networking. Each service is independently replaceable. FastAPI's dependency injection makes swapping providers clean — change the dependency, not the route handlers.
Need a different framework? See our Free Django Stack for batteries-included Python, Free Next.js Stack for React full-stack, Free Startup Stack for framework-agnostic infrastructure, Free AI Stack for ML/AI development (FastAPI is the top choice for ML serving), or Free DevOps Stack for infrastructure tooling. Or search our full index of 1,580+ developer deals.
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