Compare 30+ free hosting options — Railway, Render, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, Fly.io, Oracle Cloud, and more. Exact free tier limits by hosting type. Catalogue dates April to September 2026.
Finding free hosting in 2026 is both easier and harder than ever. Easier because there are 73 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 Cost-Optimized plan as unavailable.
This page compares every free hosting option in our index, organized by type, with exact limits read from 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Netlify: No longer in force (2026-04-14).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 ↗
DigitalOcean: Droplets moved from hourly to per-second billing (with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher) Source ↗
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.
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, then 1
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)).Its pricing page has not resolved for us since 2026-04-24, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
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.The page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read when we last looked, on 2026-09-02, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
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.
App hosting platform for Node.js, Python, Go, Java, Ruby and PHP apps. Free: your first 3 static sites, with Git deployments, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited team members; more static sites are $3 a month each. Account verification requires a credit or debit card, including for free sites, and prepaid cards are not accepted. App hosting starts at $6 a month for 1 GB RAM and 1 vCPU.
Hobby plan, $0 a month, for non-commercial personal use only. Includes 100 GB Fast Data Transfer, 1M Edge Requests, 1M Function Invocations, 4 hours Fluid Active CPU, 360 GB-hrs Fluid Provisioned Memory, 1 GB Blob Storage and 5K image transformations a month. Hobby accounts are limited to these caps and cannot buy more usage. Pro is $20 a month with one deploying seat; each additional deploying seat is $20 a month.
The Free plan is $0 with a limit of 300 credits per month, covering production deploys (15 credits each), compute (10 credits per GB-hour), bandwidth (20 credits per GB) and web requests (2 credits per 10k requests). Netlify says the Free plan is always free, with hard monthly limits that cannot be exceeded or incur costs; extra credits need a paid plan. Personal is $9 a month with 1,000 credits.
Up to 100 sites (soft limit), unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/month, 100 custom domains per projectWhen we last read the page we cite for this offer, on 2026-09-17, we found a change we could not reconcile with the terms we publish, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
Static site hosting — 1 GB published site size, 100 GB bandwidth/month, 10 builds/hour. Included with all GitHub accountsThe page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read when we last looked, on 2026-09-02, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
Decentralized web hosting platform for Web3 frontends focusing on increasing uptime and security and providing an additional access point for users.The page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read when we last looked, on 2026-09-02, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
Static, 1 GB free storage with 200 GB Bandwidth.The page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read when we last looked, on 2026-09-02, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
Documentation hosting. Read the Docs Community is free for open-source projects: it clones public repositories and hosts public documentation, supported by ads. Read the Docs Business, for commercial and non-free projects, starts at $50 a month and adds private repositories, private documentation and team management.
Static web publishing for Front-End developers. Unlimited sites with custom domain supportThe page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read when we last looked, on 2026-09-02, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
SaaS-focused website builder - unlimited websites, 70+ blocks, five templates, custom CSS, favicon, SEO and forms. No custom domain.The page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read when we last looked, on 2026-09-02, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
Stateful serverless compute — 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.
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.The page we cite for YepCode names a plan but states no amount, so these limits come from our own record rather than from that page.
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.When we last read the page we cite for this offer, on 2026-09-13, we reached a domain root that states nothing about the terms we hold, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
Automate your favorite apps and devices. Free 2 AppletsWhen we last read the page we cite for this offer, on 2026-09-20, we could read no amount, tier or rate on the page, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
Automate tedious tasks with a single click. Free 100 Tasks, 15 MinuteWhen we last read the page we cite for this offer, on 2026-09-12, we reached a domain root that states nothing about the terms we hold, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
Always Free: 2M requests/month, 360K GB-seconds memory, 180K vCPU-seconds compute, 1 GB North America egress. Fully managed serverless containersWhen we last read the page we cite for this offer, on 2026-09-22, we found a change we could not reconcile with the terms we publish, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
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
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
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, then $1 of free credit a month. AWS and Azure free tiers are mostly 12-month introductory offers, with one exception that matters in the Bandwidth column: AWS's first 100 GB of internet egress each month is free on an account of any age, aggregated across all AWS services and regions. Catalogue dates 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 Cost-Optimized 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 of free credit a month; 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 — Arm Ampere A1 at 2 OCPUs and 12 GB total across 1-2 VMs, 200 GB block volumes, 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.
Freshping Alternatives— Freshping shut down March 6, 2026 — 13 free uptime monitoring alternatives
Heroku Alternatives— Heroku removed free tier Nov 2022, entered sustaining mode Feb 2026 — 8 free PaaS options
Firebase Alternatives— Firebase Studio is closing (no new workspaces since June 22, 2026; shutdown March 22, 2027) + Cloud Storage for Firebase now requires Blaze — 7 BaaS alternatives
GitHub Actions Alternatives— GitHub postponed its self-hosted runner fee, so self-hosted runners stay free — 10 free CI/CD alternatives compared
Best Free AI & ML Tools for Developers in 2026— 65+ AI/ML tools and their free tiers compared — LLM APIs, AI coding assistants, ML platforms, observability, and specialized AI services
Best Free LLM APIs in 2026— 25+ LLM API providers and their free tiers compared — proprietary model APIs, open-model inference platforms, and AI gateways with exact rate limits
Best Free API Development Tools in 2026— 39+ free API development tools compared — REST/GraphQL clients, mocking, documentation, marketplaces, and integration platforms
The Complete Free Startup Stack for 2026— Complete free SaaS infrastructure stack — 10 categories with recommended picks, scaling guidance, and stability ratings
The Complete Free AI/ML Stack for 2026— Complete free AI/ML development stack — 10 categories with recommended picks, scaling guidance, and stability ratings
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The Complete Free Next.js Stack for 2026— Complete free Next.js full-stack infrastructure — 10 layers with recommended picks, growth cost analysis, and stability ratings
Google Developer Program 2026— Standalone Google Developer Program Premium no longer takes sign-ups — current plans, Cloud credits and free alternatives
Vercel vs Netlify Free Tier Comparison— Deep comparison of Vercel and Netlify free tiers — bandwidth, functions, builds, commercial use, and scaling costs
Railway vs Render Free Tier Comparison— Deep comparison of Railway and Render free tiers — usage-based vs fixed pricing, databases, sleep behavior, and scaling costs
Datadog vs New Relic Free Tier Comparison— Deep comparison of Datadog and New Relic free tiers — per-host vs per-GB pricing, APM, logs, synthetics, and scaling costs
Free Tier Risk Index— Predictive risk analysis for developer free tiers — grades dated and scored against what happened next, category heatmap, pattern analysis, counter-trends
Gemini API Pricing 2026— Gemini API billing guide — spend caps ($250-$100K+/mo), prepaid billing, 3.1 Pro paid-only, free tier changes, 8-provider comparison
Free Tier Tracker— Q1 2026 free tier erosion report — which developer free tiers were removed, reduced, or expanded
Startup Credits Comparison 2026— The definitive startup credits comparison — 15+ programs across cloud infrastructure, fintech, and developer tools with eligibility requirements, vesting schedules, and stacking strategies
AI Coding Tools Pricing Guide— AI coding tools pricing comparison — free tiers, pro plans, power tiers, and recent March 2026 pricing changes
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CI/CD Tools Pricing Comparison 2026— The definitive CI/CD pricing comparison — 17+ tools across general, cloud-native, mobile, and self-hosted categories with free tier analysis and cost breakdowns
Database Pricing Comparison 2026— The definitive database pricing comparison — 25+ services across managed Postgres, serverless/edge, document/NoSQL, cloud provider, and specialized categories with free tier analysis and cost breakdowns
Vector Database Pricing Comparison 2026— The definitive vector database pricing comparison — 11 services across dedicated cloud, open-source, pgvector, embedded, and serverless categories with free tier analysis for RAG/AI
Cloud Hosting & PaaS Pricing Comparison 2026— The definitive cloud hosting pricing comparison — 15 platforms across PaaS, edge/serverless, full-featured, and static categories with free tier analysis, pricing gotchas, and Railway referral
LLM API Free Tiers & Free Credits 2026— Which LLM APIs have a genuinely free tier or free credits — frontier labs, inference providers, open-source hosts, and specialized services with free tier analysis and token cost breakdowns
AWS Free Tier Complete Guide 2026— Complete AWS free tier guide — every free service, real limits, hidden costs, and Aurora PostgreSQL on the Free Tier (March 2026)
GCP Free Tier Complete Guide 2026— Complete GCP free tier guide — 20+ always-free products, $300 trial, hidden costs, and comparison with AWS and Azure
Azure Free Tier Complete Guide 2026— Complete Azure free tier guide — 65+ always-free services, $200 trial, Cosmos DB lifetime free tier, and comparison with AWS and GCP
Testing & QA Tools Free Tier Comparison 2026— Side-by-side comparison of 15+ testing tool free tiers — E2E, visual regression, load testing, API testing, local dev, and the testing cost trap at scale
API Development Tools Free Tier Comparison 2026— Side-by-side comparison of 12+ API development tool free tiers — users, collections, requests, mock servers, local-first vs cloud, and the API tool migration trap
Hosting & PaaS Free Tier Comparison 2026— Side-by-side comparison of 12+ hosting free tiers — bandwidth, compute, build minutes, cold starts, commercial use restrictions, and the hosting cost trap at scale
Developer Security Tools Free Tier Comparison 2026— Side-by-side comparison of 20+ developer security tool free tiers — SAST, SCA, DAST, secrets detection, container security, and the DevSecOps cost trap at scale
Firebase Studio Shutdown Guide— Firebase Studio shuts down March 22, 2027 — free cloud IDE alternatives with compute, storage, and collaboration limits compared
Developer Tool Shutdown Tracker 2026— Living tracker of developer tool shutdowns, API sunsets, and deprecation deadlines in 2026 — with migration paths and alternatives