Compare 30+ free hosting options — Railway, Render, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, Fly.io, Oracle Cloud, and more. Exact free tier limits by hosting type. Verified April to September 2026.
Finding free hosting in 2026 is both easier and harder than ever. Easier because there are 72 options across PaaS, static hosting, serverless functions, containers, and traditional VPS. Harder because the landscape keeps shifting — Heroku killed its free tier in 2022, Render now spins down free services after 15 minutes, Vercel moved to credit-based pricing, and Hetzner raised prices twice in 2026 and now lists every shared-vCPU plan as unavailable.
This page compares every free hosting option in our index, organized by type, with exact limits verified against live pricing pages. Whether you need a PaaS for a full-stack app, static hosting for a portfolio, serverless functions for an API, or a VPS for full control — we have the comparison.
Recent Hosting Pricing Changes
Netlify: Restructured to credit-based pricing; sites pause on credit exhaustion Source ↗
Netlify: No longer in force (2026-04-14). Every repo committer is now charged as a full Pro seat ($19/mo) when using Netlify C... Source ↗
Cloudflare: Queues added to Workers free plan — message queuing now free Source ↗
Fly.io: Volume snapshots now billed — previously free automatic snapshots now cost $0.08/GB-month Source ↗
Cloudflare Durable Objects: SQLite storage billing began for Durable Objects — previously free during beta Source ↗
Vercel: Pro plan moved to credit-based model ($20/mo credit pool), Hobby plan metrics renamed and restructured — bandwidth→Fa... Source ↗
DigitalOcean: Hatch startup program expanded to up to $100K compute credits plus up to 3 months free H100 GPU access for AI/ML star... Source ↗
Hetzner: Cloud & dedicated server prices increasing 30-50%. Entry-level CX23: €2.99→€3.99/mo (+33%). Applies to new and existi... Source ↗
Free web services (512 MB RAM, less than 1 CPU), free PostgreSQL (256 MB RAM, 30-day expiry), free Redis (25 MB). 5 GB bandwidth/month included then $0.15/GB, 500 build minutes/month. Up to 25 services, 2 environments per project. Auto-deploy from Git
Build and deploy microservices, jobs, and managed databases with a powerful UI, API & CLI. Seamlessly scale containers from version control and external Docker registries. The free tier includes two services, two cron jobs and 1 database.
A PaaS platform offering $5/month in free credits for users with a GitHub account older than 180 days. Perfect for hosting apps, databases, and more. ([Signup Link with free credit](https://ap-southeast-1.run.claw.cloud/signin)).
1 GB free web hosting with support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, .NET, Deno, Elixir, Go, Java, Lua, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust. Custom web servers, access via FTP, WebDAV and SSH. Mailbox, mailing list and app installer included. No custom domain on free plan.
Deploy up to 100 static sites for free, custom domains with SSL, 100 GB monthly bandwidth, 260+ Cloudflare CDN locations. Rebranded from Kinsta in February 2026.
PaaS service similar to Heroku with a developer-centric approach. Free tier: 3 static sites (512 MB RAM, shared CPU, Git deployment, unlimited bandwidth). Preview environments auto-deleted after 48 hours.
Hobby plan with 100 GB/month Fast Data Transfer, 1M function invocations, 4 hrs Active CPU, 360 GB-hrs Provisioned Memory, 1M edge requests, 1 GB Blob Storage, 5K image transformations/month. Note: Pro plan ($20/seat/mo) now defaults to Turbo build machines at $0.126/min (9x standard cost)
Superseded: As of 2026-09-07, netlify.com/pricing reads: The Free plan offers 300 credit limit / month, including production deploys (15 credits each), compute (10 credits per GB-hour), bandwidth (20 credits per GB), and web requests (2 credits per 10k requests). Additional credits can be purchased. We are not publishing our stored Netlify terms beside it — our own pricing change record, discovered 2026-09-07, names them as the previous ones. Read what we recorded ↓
Edge compute with 100K requests/day, 10ms CPU time per invocation. KV: 1 GB storage, 100K reads/day, 1K writes/day. D1: 5 GB storage, 5M rows read/day, 100K rows written/day. R2: 10 GB-month storage, 1M Class A ops/month, 10M Class B ops/month. Durable Objects: 100K requests/day. Queues: 10K operations/day. Vectorize: 30M queried vector dimensions/month, 5M stored. Includes cron triggers, WebSockets, and service bindings. Dynamic Workers (beta, paid plan): spawn new Workers at runtime with AI-generated code via V8 isolates. Students: upgrade to 10M requests/month free for 12 months via Workers for Students program (.edu email required)
Superseded: As of 2026-09-02, developers.cloudflare.com/durable-objects/platform/pricing reads: Workers Free plan : Only Durable Objects with SQLite storage backend are available. Free plan requests are limited to 100,000 / day and duration is limited to 13,000 GB-s / day. We are not publishing our stored Cloudflare Durable Objects terms beside it — our own pricing change record, discovered 2026-09-02, names them as the previous ones. Read what we recorded ↓
Python web hosting — Beginner plan free forever: 1 web app (yourusername.pythonanywhere.com), 512 MB disk, 100 CPU-seconds/day, 2 consoles. Outbound internet access available to whitelisted sites via HTTP(S)
All-in-one platform to connect APIs and services in a serverless environment. It brings all the agility and benefits of NoCode tools but with all the power of using programming languages. The free tier includes 50,000 yeps (seconds of execution) per month with max 300 executions/day.
Build automation flows to connect several apps together in your app's backend. For example, send a Slack message or add a Google Sheet row when an event fires in your app. Free up to 5,000 tasks per month.
Full virtual machines with root access. Maximum flexibility — you manage the OS, runtime, and deployment. Best for custom setups and production workloads.
Always-free tier includes Lambda (1M invocations/mo), DynamoDB (25 GB), CloudWatch. New accounts get $100 credit at sign-up + up to $100 more via activities, free plan for 6 months
Always Free: 1 non-preemptible e2-micro VM (us-west1, us-central1, or us-east1), 30 GB standard persistent disk, 1 GB North America egress. GPUs/TPUs excluded
There is no startup program: developer.ibm.com/startups/ redirects to the IBM Build Partners Technical Group, a community forum with threads, blogs and a member directory. Checked 2026-09-02, the destination states no credit amount, application or eligibility rule. The former offer was $120,000 in IBM Cloud credits.
There is no startup program: heroku.com/accelerate redirects to heroku.com/startups/, a marketing page on which the word program returns zero occurrences. Checked 2026-09-02, the page states no credit amount, application or eligibility rule. The former offer was platform credits, technical support and networking.
Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier is permanently free (not time-limited) and the most generous VPS offering. Cloudflare Pages and Workers offer unlimited bandwidth on free tier. Railway's Free plan opens with a 30-day $5 trial credit and then costs $1/month minimum. AWS and Azure free tiers are mostly 12-month introductory offers. Verified April to September 2026.
Hetzner raised prices twice in 2026, and its cheapest line is unavailable
Hetzner Cloud prices rose on April 1 for all customers and again on June 15 for new orders and rescales. Every shared-vCPU plan is now listed as not available, so the cheapest plan you can order is CPX12 at €11.99/mo (1 vCPU, 2 GB), read from hetzner.com on 2026-09-04. See our full pricing analysis or the Hetzner Alternatives guide.
Which Free Hosting Should I Use?
Deploying a static site or portfolio?
Cloudflare Pages (unlimited bandwidth, fast global CDN) or GitHub Pages (simplest setup, great for docs). Netlify and Vercel add serverless functions if you need them.
Building a full-stack web app?
Railway (Free plan: 30-day $5 trial credit, then $1/mo minimum; supports databases) or Render (free web services, spins down after 15 min). For edge deployment, Fly.io is paid-only for new accounts.
Building a Next.js or React app?
Vercel is purpose-built for Next.js with the best DX. Cloudflare Pages is the alternative with unlimited bandwidth. Netlify supports most frameworks.
Oracle Cloud is unmatched — 4 Arm VMs, 24 GB RAM, 200 GB storage, permanently free. AWS and Azure offer 12-month free tiers with t2.micro/B1 instances.
Running Docker containers?
Google Cloud Run (scale to zero, 2M req/mo free) or Fly.io (legacy accounts: 3 shared VMs). Railway and Koyeb (paid, from $29/mo) also run containers natively.
See our dedicated Heroku Alternatives guide. TL;DR: Railway is the closest experience, Render is the most popular alternative, and Fly.io offers the most control.
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