Published 2026-04-03 · Reviewed 2026-09-30 · Figures compiled 2026-04-03, last checked 2026-09-30 · 24 of 24 figures in the “Pricing Change Timeline” table come from our records for 1,580 developer tools · 12+ hosting platforms compared
Quick verdict: Cloudflare Pages Free offers unlimited static bandwidth, 500 builds a month and 100 projects; Cloudflare now tells new projects to start on Workers. Render has free web services (512 MB RAM, 0.1 CPU) that spin down after 15 idle minutes, and a free Postgres database that expires after 30 days. Vercel, made by the creators of Next.js, includes 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer and 1M function invocations a month on Hobby, for non-commercial personal use only. Koyeb has had no free plan for new users since February 2026; Pro starts at $29 a month.
The hosting landscape has shifted: Netlify has used credit plans for accounts created since 2025-09-04, with 300 credits a month on Free. Railway gives new accounts a 30-day trial with a $5 credit, then $1 of credit a month. Fly.io has offered no plans to new customers since October 2024; new accounts get a trial of 2 machine hours or 7 days, whichever comes first. Heroku's free plans ended in November 2022. Koyeb closed its free plan to new users in February 2026. Static hosting is still free on Cloudflare Pages, on GitHub Pages from public repositories on GitHub Free, and on Vercel Hobby for non-commercial personal use.
Free tier: Hobby includes 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer, 1M Edge Requests, 1M Function Invocations, 4 hours of Fluid Active CPU, 360 GB-hrs of Provisioned Memory, 1 GB of Blob Storage and 5K image transformations a month. Vercel is made by the creators of Next.js. Hobby includes preview deployments, Routing Middleware, ISR and image optimization. Key limitation: Hobby is for non-commercial personal use only. Commercial use needs Pro or Enterprise; Pro is $20 a month with one deploying seat and $20 for each additional deploying seat. See Vercel vs Netlify comparison →
Free tier: 300 credits a month. Bandwidth costs 20 credits per GB, about 15 GB a month if nothing else uses credits. Production deploys cost 15 credits each; deploy previews, branch deploys and failed deploys are free. Function compute costs 10 credits per GB-hour, and web requests 2 credits per 10,000. All projects pause when credits run out, with no overage charges. Accounts created before 2025-09-04 keep their legacy plans; legacy Free includes 100 GB of bandwidth and 300 build minutes a month, and 125,000 function invocations per site a month. Key limitation: bandwidth, deploys, compute and requests all draw on the one 300-credit pool.
Free tier: 100 projects per account, unlimited static bandwidth, 500 builds a month with a 20-minute timeout each, 100 custom domains per project, and 20,000 files per site, each up to 25 MiB. Pages Functions count toward the Workers Free limit of 100,000 requests a day and run with no cold starts. Cloudflare publishes Pages guides for Astro and SvelteKit. Pages takes only a static export of Next.js; for full-stack Next.js, Cloudflare recommends vinext, a beta reimplementation of the Next.js API, on Workers. Remix's successor is React Router. Cloudflare Workers also serves static assets free and without limit, and Cloudflare now tells new projects to start on Workers.
Backend & API Hosting
Full-stack PaaS platforms for backend services, APIs, and Docker containers. These give you actual compute resources, not just static file serving.
Free tier: free web services with 512 MB RAM and 0.1 CPU, and 750 free instance hours per workspace a month. They draw on a Hobby workspace's 5 GB of bandwidth and 500 build minutes a month. With a payment method on file, extra bandwidth is $0.15 per GB; without one, Render suspends free services for the rest of the month. One free Postgres database per workspace (256 MB RAM, 1 GB storage) expires 30 days after creation and is deleted 14 days later unless upgraded. One free Key Value instance per workspace (Redis-compatible, 25 MB) keeps its data in memory only. Hobby includes 2 custom domains with managed TLS, then $0.25 per domain a month. Docker images run on free web services. Key limitation: a free web service spins down after 15 minutes with no inbound traffic, and spinning it back up takes about one minute. Render says free instances are not for production.
Free tier: new accounts get a 30-day trial with a one-time $5 credit and no credit card, allowing up to 2 vCPU and 1 GB RAM per service, 5 services per project and 1 custom domain. After the trial, the Free plan gives $1 of credit a month and allows up to 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB RAM per service and 0.5 GB of volume storage. Builds are free. Docker and many languages are supported. Railway's one-click PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis and MongoDB templates are unmanaged: you handle backups, tuning, security and maintenance.
Free tier: Fly.io stopped offering plans to new customers on 2024-10-07. New accounts get a trial of 2 hours of machine runtime or 7 days, whichever comes first, before adding a payment method; after it, billing is pay-as-you-go with a payment method on file. Organizations on the Hobby, Launch or Scale plans before 2024-10-07 keep a legacy allowance: up to 3 shared-cpu-1x 256 MB VMs, 3 GB of volume storage, and 100 GB of outbound transfer a month in North America and Europe (30 GB in other regions). Volume snapshots: first 10 GB free each month, then $0.08 per GB-month.
Free tier: none for new users. Since February 2026, new users must subscribe to Pro ($29 a month plus compute, with $10 of compute included) or a higher plan. Every plan can run one free-type Postgres instance with 0.25 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 1 GB storage and 5 hours of compute a month. Organizations already on the Starter plan keep it. Paid plans deploy containers from any registry or build from Docker.
Free tier: Beginner gives one web app at your-username.pythonanywhere.com, 512 MiB of disk, 100 CPU-seconds a day for consoles and tasks (not the web app), and 2 consoles. Free web apps stop after one month unless you log in and extend them. Accounts created since 2026-01-15 (2026-01-08 in the EU) get no MySQL and no scheduled tasks. Hosts server-side Python web apps (Django, Flask and others) with many libraries preinstalled. Key limitation: custom domains are paid only. Free accounts reach the internet only over HTTP(S) and only to allowlisted sites, about 6,500 of them, including api.openai.com and api.stripe.com.
Edge & Serverless
Serverless platforms that run your code on request with no containers to manage.
Free tier: 100,000 requests a day and 10 milliseconds of CPU time per invocation. KV: 1 GB storage, 100,000 reads and 1,000 writes a day. D1: 5 GB storage, 5 million rows read and 100,000 rows written a day. Queues: 10,000 operations a day. 5 Cron Triggers per account, and SQLite-backed Durable Objects. 100 Workers per account. Workers Builds: 3,000 build minutes a month. How it runs: no cold starts, in 330+ cities. Time spent waiting on network requests does not count toward CPU time, and duration is not charged. Workers Paid starts at $5 a month. See our serverless comparison for details.
Free tier: 1M requests a month, 20 GiB of egress a month, 10 hours of active CPU a month, 1 GiB KV storage, 1,000,000 KV read units and 500,000 KV write units a month, 10 apps, 5 custom domains, and 15 builds an hour, one at a time. Runs in 2 regions. Cold starts complete within 100 ms for a hello-world app and within a few hundred ms for larger apps. Native TypeScript and JavaScript. Built-in KV with strongly consistent writes.
Static Site Hosting
Hosts that serve static files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) with no server-side code.
Free tier: every GitHub plan includes Pages; on GitHub Free it works only from public repositories. Published sites up to 1 GB, a soft limit of 100 GB of bandwidth a month, and a soft limit of 10 builds an hour that does not apply when you publish with a custom GitHub Actions workflow. Custom domains with HTTPS via Let's Encrypt. Jekyll is built in; other static site generators work through a GitHub Actions workflow or your own build. Limitations: static files only. Sites are public on every plan except Enterprise Cloud. GitHub bars using Pages to run an online business, e-commerce site or SaaS.
The Hosting Cost Trap
Free tiers look similar until you grow. Here's how costs diverge as your app scales.
Usage Scenario
Cloudflare Pages
Vercel (Pro)
Netlify (Pro)
Render
Railway
Side project (1 GB/mo bandwidth)
$0
$0 (Hobby, non-commercial)
$0 (Free)
$0
$0 on trial; then $1/mo credit or $5 Hobby
Growing app (50 GB/mo, 100 builds)
$0
$0 (Hobby, ≤1M requests, non-commercial)
$20/mo (Pro; ~2,500 credits)
~$7/mo (Hobby: 45 GB over the 5 GB included)
Greater of $5 or usage (egress: $2.50)
Production (500 GB/mo, team of 3)
$0
From $60/mo (3 seats; $80 over 1M requests)
$63/mo+ (10,000-credit tier; no seat fees)
~$96/mo + compute (Pro $25 + 475 GB at $0.15)
$25/mo egress + compute (Pro, $20 minimum)
Scale (2 TB/mo, team of 5)
$0 (bandwidth)
From $120/mo + compute (5 seats + CDN tier)
~$266/mo (bandwidth credits alone)
~$321/mo + compute (Pro $25 + 1,975 GB at $0.15)
$100/mo egress + compute (Pro)
Commercial use allowed?
✓ Yes
✗ Hobby: no
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
Vercel's commercial use restriction: Hobby is for non-commercial personal use only. Payments, ads, or being paid to build or host the site count as commercial use and need Pro at $20 a month with one deploying seat, and $20 for each additional deploying seat. Cloudflare Pages, Netlify and Render allow commercial use on their free tiers. GitHub Pages bars running an online business, shop or SaaS.
Per-seat pricing at scale: Vercel Pro charges $20 per deploying seat, so 10 deploying developers cost $200 a month before usage. Netlify's credit-based Pro plan has charged no seat fee since 2026-04-14; $19 a month per member is the Legacy Pro price. Render Pro is $25 a month flat and Railway Pro has a $20 monthly minimum that counts toward usage; both include unlimited team members and bill compute by usage.
Cold starts: Render's free web services spin down after 15 idle minutes and take about one minute to spin back up. Railway services are always on by default. Cloudflare states that Workers have no cold starts. Vercel functions can cold-start, and Vercel lists cold start prevention as a Pro feature. Koyeb and Fly.io offer new accounts no ongoing free compute.
By Use Case
Next.js → Vercel
Vercel is made by the creators of Next.js. Hobby includes ISR, Routing Middleware, image optimization and preview deployments, for non-commercial personal use. For full-stack Next.js on Cloudflare, Cloudflare recommends vinext, a beta reimplementation of the Next.js API, on Workers; Pages takes only a static export.
Backend APIs → Render
Render's free web services have 512 MB RAM and 0.1 CPU, with custom domains and TLS. Its free Postgres database expires after 30 days, and its free Key Value instance keeps data in memory only. Free services spin down after 15 idle minutes and take about a minute to return; a paid instance from $7 a month stays on. Compare with Railway →
Side projects → Cloudflare Pages + Workers
Unlimited static bandwidth, 100,000 Workers requests a day, KV and D1 storage, no cold starts, and no commercial-use restriction in Cloudflare's terms. Past 100,000 Worker requests in a day, Cloudflare returns an error for them until the limit resets at midnight UTC; static assets stay free and unlimited. Workers Paid starts at $5 a month.
Usage-based billing → Railway
Railway bills the greater of a plan's monthly minimum and your usage, with no seat charges: Pro has a $20 minimum that includes $20 of usage, and unlimited seats. New accounts get a 30-day trial with a one-time $5 credit. Builds are free, and Docker is supported. Railway's one-click database templates are unmanaged.
Docker containers → Google Cloud Run
Google Cloud Run's free tier, per billing account each month on request-based billing, is 2 million requests, 180,000 vCPU-seconds and 360,000 GiB-seconds at us-central1 prices. Services scale to zero by default. It runs any container that meets its contract (Linux x86_64 executables, listening on the configured port). After a scale to zero, a request can wait for a new instance to start, whatever the image size. Koyeb and Fly.io offer new accounts no ongoing free compute.
Unlimited static bandwidth → Cloudflare Pages
Cloudflare Pages serves static bandwidth without limit, as does Workers for static assets. The Free plan allows 20,000 files per site, each up to 25 MiB; Cloudflare says to put larger files in R2. Vercel Hobby includes 100 GB a month, GitHub Pages has a soft limit of 100 GB a month, and Netlify's 300 monthly credits cover about 15 GB if nothing else uses them.
Edge compute → Cloudflare Workers
Cloudflare Workers runs in 330+ cities with no cold starts, and time spent waiting on the network does not count toward CPU time. The Free plan includes 100,000 requests a day and 10 ms of CPU per invocation. Deno Deploy runs in 2 regions, and its Free plan includes 10 CPU-hours a month.
Static sites from a repository → GitHub Pages
GitHub Pages hosts static sites from a repository; on GitHub Free it works only from public repositories. It has a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB a month, custom domains and HTTPS. GitHub bars using it to run an online business, shop or SaaS.
Hidden Costs and Gotchas
Vercel Hobby plan bans commercial use
Vercel Hobby is for non-commercial personal use only. Commercial use, including ads, requires Pro at $20 a month with one deploying seat. GitHub Pages also bars sites run as an online business, shop or SaaS. Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Render and Railway allow commercial use on their free or entry tiers.
Render free tier spin-up (about one minute)
Render spins down a free web service after 15 minutes without inbound traffic. The next HTTP request or WebSocket connection spins it back up, which takes about one minute; browsers see a loading page meanwhile. Render says free instances are not for production applications.
Fly.io free tier is effectively gone for new accounts
New Fly.io accounts get a trial of 2 machine hours or 7 days, whichever comes first, before adding a payment method. Trial Machines stop after 5 minutes of running. The legacy free allowance is only for organizations that were on the Hobby, Launch or Scale plans before 2024-10-07. Apps stop at the end of the trial unless a payment method is added.
Netlify credit math is tricky
Netlify's Free plan gives 300 credits a month. Production deploys cost 15 credits each, bandwidth 20 credits per GB, compute 10 credits per GB-hour, and web requests 2 credits per 10,000; deploy previews and branch deploys are free. Ten production deploys a day use about 4,500 credits a month, and 20 GB of bandwidth adds 400. That is about 4,900 credits, well over the 300 limit, and every project on the account pauses.
PythonAnywhere limits outbound internet
PythonAnywhere free accounts reach only allowlisted sites over HTTP(S), about 6,500 of them, including api.openai.com and api.stripe.com; other hosts are blocked. The Developer plan, which replaced the $5 Hacker plan in January 2026, costs $10 a month and has unrestricted internet access.
Pricing Change Timeline
Recent hosting and PaaS pricing changes tracked in our index.
Date
Provider
Change
Impact
effective Oct 1, 2026
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 includes memory, so every preset costs more: shared-cpu-2x with 512 MB went from $3.89 to $4.39 a month in Ashburn and Secaucus, and performance-1x with 2 GB from $31.00 to $33.00. The smallest, shared-cpu-1x with 256 MB, is now $2.19. Source ↗
MEDIUM
effective Sep 30, 2026
AWS
AWS App Mesh reached end of support on 2026-09-30. AWS: "After September 30, 2026, you will no longer be able to access the AWS App Mesh console or AWS App Mesh resources." AWS points App Mesh users to Amazon ECS Service Connect. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Aug 28, 2026 · effective date unknown
Deno Deploy
Deno Deploy cut its Free plan's CPU time from 15 to 10 hours a month, memory time from 350 GB-hours to 150 GiB-hours, custom domains from 50 to 5, apps from 20 to 10 and team members from 5 to 3; 60 deployments an hour became 15 builds an hour, one at a time. KV read units went up from 450,000 to 1,000,000 a month and write units from 300,000 to 500,000. The pricing page changed between a Common Crawl capture of 2026-08-07 and our read on 2026-08-28. Source ↗
HIGH
discovered Aug 28, 2026 · effective date unknown
Ravion
Flightcontrol has been rebranded to Ravion. The free tier still exists, but has specific limits: 1 user, up to 50 modules, and 2,000 pipeline minutes. Unconfirmed. We could not check this change against an archived copy of Ravion's page, so it does not count toward the rating.Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Aug 28, 2026 · effective date unknown
PandaStack
The free tier now includes a $5.40/mo usage credit instead of a fixed amount of bandwidth and build minutes. Unconfirmed. We could not check this change against an archived copy of PandaStack's page, so it does not count toward the rating.Source ↗
HIGH
effective Jul 28, 2026
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, from 2026-08-07, prepaid AI Gateway credits). Source ↗
HIGH
effective Jun 30, 2026
AWS
Fargate platform version 1.3.0 reached end of support on June 30, 2026. AWS blocked new tasks and services on it from June 15 and said it would terminate the tasks still running on it on June 30. Platform version 1.4.0 replaces it. Source ↗
MEDIUM
effective Jun 15, 2026
Hetzner
From 2026-06-15, for new orders and rescales, Hetzner's EU cloud prices excluding IPv4 rose 30-38% on Cost-Optimized CX/CAX, 144-175% on Regular Performance CPX (shared resources) and 113-173% on General Purpose CCX (dedicated vCPUs). Existing contracts kept their terms. New dedicated servers also rose: the AX42 and AX102 cost €97.30 and €257.30 from 30 June, up from €57.30 and €122.30 after April in Germany. Source ↗
HIGH
effective Apr 30, 2026
AWS
AWS App Runner closed to new customers. Service enters maintenance mode with no new features. AWS recommends migrating to Amazon ECS Express Mode for simplified container deployment. Source ↗
HIGH
effective Apr 23, 2026
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 Hobby workspaces are now capped at 25 services. New workspaces got the new plans on 2026-04-23 and existing workspaces moved on 2026-08-01. Free web services, Postgres and Key Value kept their specs, and free web services draw on the workspace's included bandwidth. Source ↗
HIGH
effective Apr 20, 2026
AWS
Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client stopped accepting new customers on 2026-04-20. Existing customers can keep using their devices, and can still order more, until AWS ends support on 2027-03-31. Source ↗
LOW
effective Apr 14, 2026
Netlify
Netlify changed its credit rates: bandwidth went from 10 to 20 credits per GB and compute from 5 to 10 credits per GB-hour, while web requests went from 3 to 2 credits per 10,000. The Free plan keeps 300 credits a month, so each credit buys half as much bandwidth and compute. Source ↗
MEDIUM
Data Source
How we track this data: the tables on this page were compiled by hand from vendor pricing pages. They do not come from the catalogue behind our search and MCP tools. Prices and limits are for free tiers only — paid tier comparisons use publicly available list prices. Compiled 2026-04-03, last checked 2026-09-30. Check data freshness.
A source check reads each cited page for that service's name and a price. The figures in the tables above are from our own records, except for the services whose entry below dates them to a read of the vendor's own page.
Cloudflare Workers — We read that on 2026-10-04 from developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Cloudflare Workers as "cloudflare workers" and states "$5" and "$5.00" and "10,000 operations/day" and "30 million queried vector dimensions / month"
Deno Deploy — We read that on 2026-09-24 from deno.com/deploy/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Deno Deploy as "deno deploy" and states "1 GiB KV read units/mo" and "1,000,000 KV write units/mo". Our stored terms were last confirmed on 2026-09-24.
Fly.io — We read that on 2026-10-02 from fly.io/docs/about/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Fly.io as "fly io" and states "$0.08"
GitHub Pages — the page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read
Heroku — no catalogue record
Koyeb — We read that on 2026-10-02 from koyeb.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Koyeb as "koyeb" and states "$ 29" and "$10" and "$ 10.0"
Netlify — We read that on 2026-10-04 from netlify.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Netlify as "netlify" and states "$0" and "$9" and "300 credit limit / month" and "1,000 credits / month". Our stored terms were last confirmed on 2026-10-04.
PythonAnywhere — We read that on 2026-10-03 from pythonanywhere.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names PythonAnywhere as "pythonanywhere" and states "$ 0"
Railway — We read that on 2026-10-06 from railway.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Railway as "railway" and states "$ 0" and "$5" and "$1" and "$ 5". The terms above come from our read of 2026-09-03, and we have read the page since, on 2026-10-06, without confirming them.
Render — We read that on 2026-10-02 from render.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Render as "render" and states "$ 0" and "$ 25" and "$0" and "$25". Our stored terms were last confirmed on 2026-10-02.
Vercel — We read that on 2026-09-22 from vercel.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Vercel as "vercel" and states "$0" and "100 GB / month" and "1M allowed requests / month" and "1 GB / month"
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best free cloud hosting service in 2026?
We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 61 Cloud Hosting services in our catalogue, each with the free tier terms. This page compares them on free tier limits, what each charges past them, and lock-in risk; the table above carries the figures side by side. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.
Which cloud hosting free tier is most generous?
We name no most generous free tier here, because generosity is not one quantity: the columns above measure different things and a tier that leads one trails another.
How do cloud hosting free tiers compare on limits?
Each provider structures free tier limits differently — some cap storage, others cap requests or compute hours. Our comparison table gives each provider's published limits; figures marked ~ are estimates. See The Hosting Cost Trap for what you pay past the free limits.