Hetzner Alternatives After April 2026 Price Increase

Hobby plan, $0 a month plus compute. Free web services (512 MB RAM, 0.1 CPU) spin down after 15 minutes without traffic, with 750 free instance hours per workspace a month. One free Postgres database (256 MB RAM, 1 GB storage, 30-day expiry) and one free Key Value instance (25 MB, not continuously persisted to disk) per workspace. 5 GB bandwidth/month included then $0.15/GB; without a payment method on file, Render suspends Free services for the rest of the month instead. 500 build minutes/month. Up to 25 services, unlimited projects with 2 environments each. Pro is $25 a month plus compute.

• Render's docs say not to use Free instances for production applications. (From render.com/docs/free, read 2026-10-05.)
• Free web services cannot send outbound traffic on ports 25, 465, or 587, commonly used for SMTP. (From render.com/docs/free, read 2026-10-05.)
• A free Postgres database expires 30 days after creation and becomes inaccessible. You then have a 14-day grace period to upgrade to a paid plan before Render deletes it with all its data. (From render.com/docs/free, read 2026-10-05.)
• Free Postgres databases have no backups of any kind. (From render.com/docs/free, read 2026-10-05.)
• A free web service loses any changes to its local filesystem, such as uploaded images or a SQLite database, every time it redeploys, restarts or spins down, and it cannot attach a persistent disk. (From render.com/docs/free, read 2026-10-05.)
• If a workspace uses all 750 free instance hours in a month, Render suspends all of its free web services until the start of the next month. (From render.com/docs/free, read 2026-10-12.)
• Render's free web services need no credit card. (From render.com/articles/platforms-with-a-real-free-tier-for-developers-in-2026, read 2026-10-22.)
• Render Sandboxes runs isolated microVMs for agents and untrusted code. It is available on every plan including Hobby, billed at $0.12 per active CPU hour plus $0.038 per hour for memory for the default size. (From render.com/pricing, read 2026-10-29.)
• A Hobby workspace allows 100 concurrent sandboxes by default. There is no maximum session length on any plan, including Hobby. (From render.com/pricing, read 2026-11-07.)
• Render Sandboxes is in public beta. During the beta, sandboxes have no public URL and no private network to other Render services. (From render.com/docs/sandboxes, read 2026-10-29.)
• Render offers Free instances only for static sites, web services, Postgres and Key Value. Background workers and cron jobs need a paid compute plan. (From render.com/docs/free, read 2026-11-05.)

Edge compute with 100K requests/day, 10ms CPU time per invocation, 5 cron triggers/account. KV: 1 GB storage, 100K reads/day, 1K writes/day. D1: 5 GB storage, 5M rows read/day, 100K rows written/day. R2 (Standard storage): 10 GB-month/month, 1M Class A ops/month, 10M Class B ops/month. Durable Objects (SQLite-backed only): 100K requests/day. Queues: 10K operations/day. Vectorize: 30M queried vector dimensions/month, 5M stored vector dimensions. Dynamic Workers are paid only. US students 18+ with a verified .edu billing email: Workers Paid (10M requests/month), $5/mo fee waived for 12 months. Workers Paid has a minimum charge of $5 per month per account. It includes 10 million requests and 30 million CPU milliseconds monthly. Each additional million requests costs $0.30. Each additional million CPU milliseconds costs $0.02. Duration is not charged.

• On the Free plan an account's Workers get 100,000 requests a day, shared with Pages Functions and reset at midnight UTC. Past that, a route set to fail closed returns Cloudflare's error 1027, and a route set to fail open skips the Worker as if none were configured. (From developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits, read 2026-10-06.)
• On the Free plan a request may use 10 ms of CPU time; one that uses more fails with error 1102. Time spent waiting on fetch calls, KV reads or database queries does not count. (From developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits, read 2026-10-06.)
• Cloudflare's terms prohibit processing or collecting credit card information on any site using its free services. (From cloudflare.com/terms, read 2026-10-06.)
• Cloudflare's subscription agreement's list of restrictions does not include commercial use. The only restriction specific to free services bars processing or collecting credit card information on the site. (From cloudflare.com/terms, read 2026-10-29.)
• Cloudflare's subscription agreement bars signing up for the services on behalf of a third party unless Cloudflare permits it in writing. (From cloudflare.com/terms, read 2026-10-29.)
• Cloudflare may change a Worker's workers.dev subdomain for any reason. Custom domains are not affected. (From cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-developer-platform, read 2026-10-06.)
• Until December 1, 2026, Workers Logs on the Free plan allows 200,000 log events written per day with 3-day retention; from that date it allows 0.5 GB of log and trace ingestion per day for the whole account with seven-day retention. The Paid plan includes 20 million log events per month, then $0.60 per additional million, with 7-day retention. (From developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing, read 2026-10-17.)
• From December 1, 2026, all Cloudflare logs and traces use the same pricing model. These share one account-level ingestion and storage allowance: Workers Logs, Workers Traces, Cloudflare Traces, Containers logs, R2 Data Access Logs, AI Gateway logs and Issues. Free includes 0.5 GB of ingestion per day and seven-day retention; ingestion stops at the daily limit and resumes at 00:00 UTC. Paid includes 50 GB of ingestion and 10 GB-month of storage per billing cycle, then $0.25 per GB of ingestion and $0.10 per GB-month of storage. (From developers.cloudflare.com/observability/pricing, read 2026-10-17.)
• Cloudflare Workers' Free plan needs no credit card. (From cloudflare.com/products/workers, read 2026-10-22.)

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 during trial, then 1

• After the 30-day trial, the Free plan allows 1 project, 3 services per project and no custom domains. Cron jobs are available during the trial only. (From railway.com/pricing, read 2026-10-12.)
• Railway's trial, with a one-time $5 credit, needs no credit card. (From railway.com/pricing, read 2026-10-22.)
• After 30 days passes or $5 is spent, the free trial reverts to the Free plan, which provides $1 of free credit per month. The credit does not roll over month to month. (From docs.railway.com/pricing/free-trial, read 2026-11-03.)
• Run `ssh railway.new` to get a free Linux VM with no account or credit card. The VM has 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, and a preview URL. Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and the Railway Agent are preinstalled. Railway identifies you by your SSH key. Each VM can be used for 60 minutes. You can get 3 VMs per IP address per day. (From docs.railway.com/pricing/free-trial, read 2026-11-02.)
• Open the claim link from the welcome message and sign up within 24 hours to keep the VM. The VM, files, and URL move into your account. Unclaimed VMs are deleted with their files. Railway caps free VMs at high demand. (From docs.railway.com/pricing/free-trial, read 2026-11-02.)
• Railway Sandboxes are available on every plan. Usage draws from the plan's included credit. Free plan limits are 10 sandboxes per environment, 2 vCPU and 2 GB each, and an idle timeout of at most 5 minutes. (From docs.railway.com/sandboxes, read 2026-11-03.)
• SMTP is only available on Railway's Pro plan and above. SMTP is disabled on the Free, Trial, and Hobby plans. Those plans must use transactional email services with HTTPS APIs. (From docs.railway.com/networking/outbound-networking, read 2026-11-07.)
• Railway's Hobby plan has a $5 monthly minimum, including $5 of usage credits. If usage is $5 or less per billing period, no extra charge applies. If usage exceeds $5, Railway charges the total usage. Included usage resets each billing cycle and does not accumulate. (From railway.com/pricing, read 2026-11-10.)
• The Limited Trial for trial accounts not verified through GitHub has restricted outbound network access and only a limited set of ports. Verification is an automated process at railway.com/verify. Railway does not respond to requests for verification. The Hobby plan unlocks the full experience. (From docs.railway.com/pricing/free-trial, read 2026-11-07.)
• Railway deletes stateful volumes created by Trial accounts 30 days after the expiration of the trial credits. An upgrade retains the data. (From docs.railway.com/pricing/free-trial, read 2026-11-07.)

Pay-as-you-go only — no free tier for new accounts (since Oct 2024). Legacy accounts (Hobby/Launch/Scale plans) retain: 3 shared-cpu-1x VMs (256 MB RAM), 3 GB volume storage, 100 GB transfer/month. Volume snapshots: first 10 GB free, then $0.08/GB/month.

• Fly.io's trial needs no credit card; after the trial, a credit card is needed to keep using billable resources. (From docs.fly.io/about/pricing, read 2026-10-22.)
• Fly.io's free trial lasts 2 hours of machine runtime or 7 days, whichever comes first. Trial machines stop automatically after 5 minutes of running. The trial allows 10 machines, 20 GB of volume storage, and up to 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of memory per machine. Dedicated IPv4 addresses and performance-optimized vCPUs are not included. (From docs.fly.io/about/free-trial, read 2026-11-03.)
• If you use up the trial's resources, or do not add a payment method within 7 days, your apps stop running and you cannot launch new machines, attach volumes or deploy changes until billing is set up. Adding a card ends the free trial and starts billing. (From docs.fly.io/about/free-trial, read 2026-11-03.)
• Fly.io offers Sprites, its Linux VMs for AI agents, with a one-time $30 trial credit. (From fly.io/sprites, read 2026-11-03.)

New accounts get a $5 signup credit, applied automatically to the first team and expiring 90 days after signup; a payment method is required before creating resources. Basic Droplets from $4/mo (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD). Per-second billing (min 60s or $0.01). App Platform: 3 free static sites (1 GiB outbound/mo each). Functions: 90,000 GiB-seconds/mo free. Spaces: 250 GB + 1 TB transfer for $5/mo. Managed databases start at $15/mo (not free). No perpetual free compute tier

• A powered-off Droplet is still billed, because its resources stay reserved; only destroying it ends billing. (From docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/details/pricing, read 2026-10-07.)

DigitalOcean Startups is not taking new applications. Its FAQ, read 2026-10-30: "Applications for our current cohort are temporarily paused as we prepare to launch an updated program experience in early 2027." Active members keep their benefits. For members: credits for 12 months in an amount that varies by startup, usable up to $10,000 a month; use beyond that in a month is charged. Since 2026-05-13 the credits exclude GPU Droplets, NVIDIA H100 GPU Kubernetes, Bare Metal GPUs, Dedicated and Serverless Inference, third-party AI models, Paperspace Machines and Cloudways. GPU credits are a separate benefit for selected startups. 15 months of free Standard-tier support. For startups that have raised $10M or less and have not used DigitalOcean credits before; AI-native startups are prioritised and service businesses are not eligible.

Always Free includes 2 AMD VMs (1/8 OCPU, 1 GB each), Arm Ampere A1 at 2 OCPUs and 12 GB total across 1-2 VMs, 200 GB block volumes, 20 GB object storage, 2 Autonomous Databases, Load Balancer

• Oracle may reclaim Always Free compute instances if CPU utilization is less than 20% for 95% of the time, network utilization is less than 20%, and memory utilization is less than 20% (A1 shapes only) during a 7-day period. (From docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm, read 2026-10-10.)
• An account left idle for 30 days or more may be deemed abandoned and become eligible for suspension or termination. (From oracle.com/cloud/free, read 2026-10-10.)
• Oracle accepts credit cards and debit cards that function like credit cards, but not debit cards with a PIN, virtual, single-use, or prepaid cards. The card check places a temporary authorization hold that is not a charge. (From oracle.com/cloud/free, read 2026-10-10.)
• The $300 trial ends after 30 days or when the credit is used up. An account that does nothing keeps its Always Free services. (From oracle.com/cloud/free, read 2026-10-10.)
• Always Free compute instances must be created in the tenancy's home region. (From docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm, read 2026-10-29.)
• An "out of host capacity" error means a temporary lack of Always Free shapes in the home region. Try another availability domain, or wait and try again. Upgrading to Pay as You Go gives access to more compute types. Oracle does not charge for Always Free resources after the upgrade, only for usage above the Always Free limits. (From docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm, read 2026-10-29.)
• Always Free includes one standalone MySQL HeatWave DB system with a single-node HeatWave cluster in the home region. It has 50 GB of storage for data and logs and another 50 GB for backups. (From docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm, read 2026-10-29.)
• One Oracle Cloud Free Tier account is permitted per person. Creating multiple free accounts is prohibited. (From oracle.com/cloud/free/faq, read 2026-10-29.)
• Oracle Cloud Free Tier does not include SLAs. Customers using only Always Free resources are not eligible for Oracle Support. Community support is available through Oracle's forums. (From oracle.com/cloud/free/faq, read 2026-10-29.)

Start tier: up to $2,000 in Google Cloud credits, valid for one year, for pre-funded startups. Scale tier: up to $200,000 over 2 years for startups with equity funding from pre-seed to Series A (year 1 covers usage up to $100,000; year 2 covers 20% of spend, up to $100,000 more). AI-first startups get $150,000 more, up to $350,000. Includes 12 months of Google Workspace Business Plus.

Always Free: 2M requests/month, 360K GB-seconds memory, 180K vCPU-seconds compute, 1 GB North America egress. Fully managed serverless containers. If your service uses instance-based billing, its free tier is 240K vCPU-seconds and 450K GiB-seconds a month instead of 180K and 360K. Jobs get the same 240K and 450K. Delayed Jobs get 342,857 vCPU-seconds and 642,857 GiB-seconds a month, and worker pools 384,204 vCPU-seconds and 728,744 GiB-seconds (Google states each free tier at us-central1 prices).When we read the page we cite for this offer on 2026-10-13, we refused the change we considered recording because it named no figure that had moved, and we have read it again since, on 2026-11-02, without confirming the terms above, so we cannot confirm these terms today.

• Google Cloud's Free Tier requires a billing account. (From docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features, read 2026-10-07.)
• Usage beyond the Free Tier's monthly limits is billed at standard rates. (From docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features, read 2026-10-07.)
• Google Cloud's Terms of Service grant use for customer applications with material value independent of the services. The terms restrict resale and circumventing fees but do not prohibit commercial use. (From cloud.google.com/terms, read 2026-10-29.)
• Free Tier monthly usage limits are calculated per billing account. (From docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features, read 2026-10-29.)
• Google Cloud's terms prohibit creating multiple projects to simulate a single project or circumvent usage limits. (From cloud.google.com/terms, read 2026-11-07.)
• Apps deployed from Google AI Studio can run on Cloud Run under Google's Starter Tier, which needs no credit card or billing account and limits regions, quotas and resources. (From docs.cloud.google.com/docs/starter-tier, read 2026-10-12.)
• In Tier 1 regions such as Iowa (us-central1), the default request-based rates past the free tier are $0.000024 per vCPU-second, $0.0000025 per GiB-second, and $0.40 per million requests. In Tier 2 regions such as London (europe-west2), the rates are $0.0000336 per vCPU-second and $0.0000035 per GiB-second. (From cloud.google.com/run/pricing, read 2026-10-29.)
• When a spend cap is hit, Cloud Run workloads pause. Services return 5xx errors. The cap resets on the first day of the next billing cycle. (From docs.cloud.google.com/run/docs/configuring/billing-settings, read 2026-10-29.)
• Spend cap enforcement is not instant. Any cost overages before enforcement are billed as normal. (From docs.cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets-spend-caps, read 2026-10-29.)

Always Free: 1 non-preemptible e2-micro VM (us-west1, us-central1, or us-east1), 30 GB standard persistent disk, 1 GB of outbound data transfer a month from North America to all destinations except China and Australia. GPUs/TPUs excluded.

• Google Cloud's Free Tier requires a billing account. (From docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features, read 2026-10-07.)
• A new Google Cloud user gets the billing account by signing up for the Free Trial, which requires a credit card or other payment method. Google uses it to verify identity and reduce fraud. (From docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features, read 2026-10-23.)
• Usage beyond the Free Tier's monthly limits is billed at standard rates. (From docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features, read 2026-10-07.)
• The e2-micro instance limit is by time, not by instance: all e2-micro instances together are free for the number of hours in the month. (From docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features, read 2026-10-04.)
• An external IPv4 address in use on a VM, including the free e2-micro, costs $0.005 an hour. The free tier covers one hour a month. A VM running all month pays about $3.65 for it. External IPv6 addresses are free. (From cloud.google.com/vpc/network-pricing, read 2026-10-11.)
• The free tier covers 30 GB-months of standard persistent disk. A disk created in the Google Cloud console defaults to balanced persistent disk, which the free tier does not cover. Choose Standard persistent disk, or create the VM with the gcloud CLI, which defaults to standard. (From docs.cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/persistent-disks, read 2026-10-11.)
• If you do not upgrade to a Paid billing account by the end of the 90-day trial or after spending the $300 credit, your Free Trial billing account closes and all its resources stop, including a free e2-micro VM. They are permanently deleted after a 30-day grace period without an upgrade. After upgrading, the Free Tier still applies. (From docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features, read 2026-11-02.)
• The Free Tier has no end date. Google may change or eliminate its usage limits with 30 days' advance notice. (From docs.cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features, read 2026-11-02.)

Public Cloud free trial: a €200 credit (US$200 on its international site) for a first Public Cloud project, valid for one month after activation; a payment method is required. VPS from €4.49/month ex-VAT without commitment (VPS-1 2027: 2 vCores, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe; €3.81 on 12 months). This is the range OVHcloud sells now. Discovery instances (d2-2) from ~€5/mo. Object Storage (S3-compatible). Managed Kubernetes (free control plane). 40+ regions across Europe, NA, APAC. From April 2026, OVHcloud raised VPS 2026 list prices 36-49% (VPS-1 €4.49 to €6.49). The VPS 2027 range launched after that rise. Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Bare Metal prices rose 9-11% on average for new deployments.

OVHcloud sells dedicated servers in five ranges: Kimsufi (T1/T2), its current budget range, sold on kimsufi.com; Advance (T3) from $136.00 a month ex. taxes; Game (T3: high-frequency processors and DDoS protection for online gaming) from $331.00; Scale (T4) from $638.00; and High Grade (T5) from $1,481.00 (prices from its international site). OVHcloud says traffic is unlimited and unmetered by default, except in its Asia-Pacific datacentres. Bare Metal prices rose 9-11% for new deployments in April 2026.

Free Tier Program: a free cloud instance (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD, IPv4 address) in Miami, Seattle or Frankfurt, for applicants Vultr admits. Vultr calls it early access in limited quantities and admits eligible applicants at random, weighted by a score built from what they say about themselves and their intended use. New customers can also claim promotional credit, up to $300, with codes on Vultr's coupons page; it applies to select products only, cannot be combined with other offers, and expires. Paid Cloud Compute starts at $2.50/mo for 1 vCPU, 512 MB and 10 GB SSD on IPv6 only (New Jersey and Atlanta), $3.50/mo for the same plan without the IPv6-only restriction (New Jersey), and $5/mo for 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM and 25 GB SSD. Billed hourly.We could not read the page we cite for this offer when we last looked, on 2026-11-01, so we cannot confirm these terms today.

• Admission to the free instance is not guaranteed: Vultr grants it at random to eligible applicants in limited quantities, weighted by a score, and does not explain why an account was not admitted. (From vultr.com/free-tier-program, read 2026-10-06.)
• Coupon credit is for new customers only, applies to select products only, and cannot be combined with any other offer. (From vultr.com/coupons, read 2026-10-06.)
• A card or PayPal account must be linked to sign up and to be eligible for any promotion, Vultr allows one promotion per user, and promotional credit expires; the pages for the $200, $250 and $300 codes state no expiry period. (From vultr.com/faq, read 2026-10-06.)
• A stopped instance is still billed, because its CPU, RAM, storage and IP addresses stay reserved; only destroying it ends billing. (From docs.vultr.com/support/platform/billing/are-stopped-instances-still-billed-on-vultr, read 2026-10-07.)

Akamai Cloud, formerly Linode: a new user who signs up through a referral link gets a $100, 60-day credit, applied once a valid payment method is on the account. Shared CPU plans start with the Nanode 1 GB at $5/mo in most regions (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 25 GB of storage, 1 TB transfer); the next plan, 2 GB RAM, is $12/mo.

• The $100 is a 60-day credit, applied only after a valid payment method is added to the new account. (From techdocs.akamai.com/cloud-computing/docs/referral-program, read 2026-10-06.)
• Every service on the account is billed even while powered off or unused; only removing it stops the charges. (From techdocs.akamai.com/cloud-computing/docs/understanding-how-billing-works, read 2026-10-07.)

Virtual private servers billed by the hour, up to a fixed monthly price per bundle. No free trial for new customers: AWS replaced Lightsail's free trials (up to 90 days on select bundles) with the AWS Free Tier, whose credits ($100 at sign-up and up to $100 more) pay for Lightsail like any other service. Linux bundles with a public IPv4 address start at $5/mo for 2 vCPUs, 0.5 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD and 1 TB transfer, then $7/mo (1 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD, 2 TB) and $12/mo (2 GB RAM, 60 GB SSD, 3 TB). IPv6-only Linux bundles start at $3.50/mo (512 MB RAM, 20 GB SSD, 1 TB), and Windows bundles at $9.50/mo. Inbound and outbound transfer both count toward a bundle's allowance; outbound transfer beyond it costs from $0.09/GB, and bundles in Mumbai, Sydney, Jakarta, Malaysia, Hong Kong and São Paulo get half the allowance.

• Lightsail's own free trials are closed to new customers. A trial started before AWS removed them runs to the end of its period, and the resources then bill monthly. (From docs.aws.amazon.com/lightsail/latest/userguide/amazon-lightsail-frequently-asked-questions-faq-billing-and-account-management.html, read 2026-10-06.)
• An instance or managed database is charged until it is deleted, including while it is stopped. (From docs.aws.amazon.com/lightsail/latest/userguide/amazon-lightsail-frequently-asked-questions-faq-billing-and-account-management.html, read 2026-10-06.)
• A static IP is free only while attached to an instance: AWS charges $0.005 an hour for one left unattached for more than an hour, and an IPv6-only instance cannot take one. (From docs.aws.amazon.com/lightsail/latest/userguide/amazon-lightsail-frequently-asked-questions-faq-billing-and-account-management.html, read 2026-10-06.)