Quick verdict:Cloudflare Pages is the most generous free hosting for static/Jamstack sites — unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/month, 100 sites. For full-stack apps, Render offers free web services with 512 MB RAM, free PostgreSQL, and custom domains. Vercel remains the best Next.js host with 100 GB bandwidth and 1M serverless invocations, but the Hobby plan bans commercial use. Koyeb is database-only now — a free Postgres instance (0.25 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 5 hrs/month) with scale-to-zero, but no free web service since that tier was removed. Hosting on Koyeb starts at $29/month.
The hosting landscape has shifted: Netlify moved to credit-based pricing (300 credits/month). Railway offers a $5 trial credit (not unlimited free). Fly.io reduced its free tier to a 2-hour trial for new accounts. Heroku’s free tier is gone since 2022. The era of unlimited free PaaS hosting is over — but static hosting remains genuinely free thanks to Cloudflare, GitHub Pages, and Vercel.
Best platforms for deploying Next.js, Remix, Astro, and static sites. These platforms specialize in frontend frameworks with serverless function support.
Free tier: 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. The gold standard for Next.js deployment — built by the same team. Automatic preview deployments, edge middleware, ISR, and image optimization. Key limitation: Hobby plan prohibits commercial use. Any production app generating revenue needs the $20/seat/mo Pro plan. See Vercel vs Netlify comparison →
Free tier: 300 credits/month. Bandwidth costs 20 credits/GB (~15 GB), builds cost 15 credits each (~20 builds). Sites pause on credit exhaustion — no overages. Serverless functions at Level 0 (125K invocations). Legacy accounts (pre-Sep 2025) keep the old model: 100 GB bandwidth + 300 build minutes. Key limitation: The credit system is less predictable than flat limits. Heavy builders or bandwidth-intensive sites can exhaust credits quickly.
Free tier: Up to 100 sites, unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/month, 100 custom domains per project. No build time limits per build. Pages Functions run on Cloudflare Workers (100K requests/day free). Supports Next.js, Astro, SvelteKit, Remix via adapter. The standout: Unlimited bandwidth is unique among hosting platforms. No cold starts since Pages Functions run on Workers edge. Best for static sites, Jamstack apps, and projects where bandwidth usage is unpredictable.
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, less than 1 CPU, 5 GB bandwidth/month included then $0.15/GB, 500 build minutes/month. Free PostgreSQL database (256 MB RAM, 30-day expiry for inactive DBs). Free Redis (25 MB). Custom domains with automatic SSL. Key limitation: Free services spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity with 30–60 second cold starts. The PostgreSQL free tier deletes data after 30 days of inactivity. Best for side projects, staging environments, and apps that can tolerate cold starts. See Railway vs Render comparison →
Free tier: $5 one-time credit with 30-day trial. 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM per service, 0.5 GB volume storage, 1 project, 3 services max. No credit card required. Usage-based billing after trial — $1/mo minimum on Developer plan. Supports Docker, Node.js, Python, Go, Rust, and more. Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB. Key limitation: This is a trial, not a permanent free tier. The $5 credit runs out, and $1/mo minimum applies after. But the DX is exceptional — the best deploy experience of any PaaS.
Free tier: No free tier for new accounts since October 2024. Pay-as-you-go only, credit card required. Legacy accounts on deprecated 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. Key limitation: Fly.io is a paid platform with no trial or free tier for new signups. The legacy free allowance was generous, but is only available to existing accounts on deprecated plans.
Free tier: Free Postgres database only (0.25 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 1 GB storage, 5 hr/month runtime). No free compute or web service tier — the free web service was removed. Pro plan starts at $29/month with $10 included compute. Docker, buildpack, and pre-built image support on paid plans. Key change: Koyeb no longer offers a free compute tier. The free Postgres database is useful for development, but you'll need the Pro plan ($29/mo) for hosting web services.
Edge & Serverless
Edge compute and serverless platforms — no containers to manage, globally distributed, near-zero cold starts.
Free tier: 100K requests/day, 10ms CPU time per invocation. KV: 1 GB storage, 100K reads/day, 1K writes/day. D1 (SQLite): 5 GB storage, 5M rows read/day, 100K rows written/day. Queues, Cron Triggers, and Durable Objects all included. The edge advantage: Workers run in 300+ global locations with ~0ms cold start. CPU-time billing (not wall-clock) makes I/O-heavy workloads 10–50x cheaper than traditional serverless. See our serverless comparison for details.
Free tier: 1M requests/month, 20 GiB egress, 1 GiB KV storage, 1M KV read units/month, 10 hours active CPU time/month. Runs in 35+ edge locations. Native TypeScript/JavaScript. Built-in KV database with strong consistency. Key advantage: The most generous edge compute free tier by CPU time. Best for TypeScript-first projects, API servers, and apps that need a built-in database without external dependencies.
Static Site Hosting
The simplest free hosting — just HTML, CSS, and JS. No server-side compute, no cold starts, no complexity.
Free tier: Included with all GitHub accounts (free and paid). 1 GB published site size, 100 GB bandwidth/month, 10 builds/hour. Custom domains with automatic HTTPS via Let's Encrypt. Jekyll built-in, or use GitHub Actions for any static site generator. Best for: Documentation, personal sites, open-source project pages. The simplest path from repo to website. No signup beyond GitHub. Limitation: no server-side processing, and sites must be public on free GitHub accounts.
Free tier: Beginner plan — 1 web app (username.pythonanywhere.com), 512 MB disk, 100 CPU-seconds/day, 2 consoles. Python/Django/Flask hosting with pre-installed packages. Key limitation: No custom domain on free tier (subdomain only). No outbound internet access (can't call external APIs). The 100 CPU-seconds/day cap is very restrictive. Best for learning Python web development and prototyping.
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
$0
$0
$0 (trial credit)
Growing app (50 GB/mo, 100 builds)
$0
$0 (Hobby)
$0 (if credits last)
~$7/mo (Hobby: 45 GB over the 5 GB included)
~$5–10/mo
Production (500 GB/mo, team of 3)
$0
$60/mo (Pro, $20/seat)
$57/mo (Pro, $19/seat)
~$96/mo (Pro $25 + 475 GB at $0.15)
~$15–30/mo
Scale (2 TB/mo, team of 5)
$0 (bandwidth)
$100/mo + overages
$95/mo + overages
~$321/mo (Pro $25 + 1,975 GB at $0.15)
~$30–60/mo
Commercial use allowed?
✓ Yes
✗ Hobby: no
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
Vercel's commercial use restriction: The Hobby plan explicitly prohibits commercial use. Any app generating revenue, displaying ads, or serving a business purpose requires the $20/seat/month Pro plan. This is the biggest gotcha in developer hosting — you can build and deploy for free, but the moment your project succeeds, you owe $20/seat/month minimum. Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, and Render all allow commercial use on their free tiers.
Per-seat pricing at scale: Vercel ($20/seat) and Netlify ($19/seat) charge per team member. A team of 10 developers costs $200/mo on Vercel before any compute charges. Railway and Render use usage-based pricing — you pay for compute consumed, not team size. For growing teams, usage-based platforms often cost less than per-seat platforms.
The cold start tax: Render's free web services spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity, causing 30–60 second cold starts for the next request. This makes Render's free tier unsuitable for production APIs where response time matters. Railway keeps services always-on during your trial. Koyeb and Fly.io no longer offer free compute tiers for new accounts. Vercel and Cloudflare use serverless/edge models that avoid traditional cold starts entirely.
Best for Each Use Case
Recommendations by Use Case
Best for Next.js → Vercel
Built by the Next.js team. Automatic ISR, edge middleware, image optimization, and preview deployments. The tightest integration of any framework-hosting pair. Just connect your repo. If you outgrow Hobby, Cloudflare Pages with the Next.js adapter is the best free alternative.
Best for backend APIs → Render
512 MB RAM web services with free PostgreSQL and Redis. Custom domains, automatic SSL. The most complete free backend package. Accept the 30–60s cold starts for side projects, or pay $7/mo for always-on. Compare with Railway →
Best for side projects → Cloudflare Pages + Workers
Unlimited bandwidth, 100K Workers requests/day, built-in KV/D1 storage. No cold starts, no spending surprises, no commercial use restrictions. The closest thing to truly unlimited free hosting.
Best for startups graduating from free tier → Railway
Usage-based pricing with no per-seat charges. The $5 trial lets you validate before committing. Excellent DX with instant deploys, managed databases, and Docker support. Costs scale linearly with usage, not team size.
Best for Docker containers → Google Cloud Run
2M requests/month free with automatic scale-to-zero. Supports any Docker container. No cold start penalty for lightweight images. Koyeb removed its free compute tier and Fly.io has no free tier for new accounts. Railway supports Docker but is trial-only ($5 credit).
Most generous free bandwidth → Cloudflare Pages
Unlimited bandwidth, no asterisks. Vercel offers 100 GB, GitHub Pages 100 GB, Netlify ~15 GB (credit-based). For bandwidth-intensive sites (media, downloads, high-traffic blogs), Cloudflare Pages has no equal.
Best for edge/low-latency → Cloudflare Workers
300+ global locations, ~0ms cold starts, CPU-time billing (not wall-clock). For latency-sensitive APIs and edge compute, Workers is the clear winner. Deno Deploy is the runner-up with 35+ locations and more generous CPU time.
Simplest static hosting → GitHub Pages
If you have a GitHub account, you already have hosting. Push HTML to a repo, enable Pages, done. 100 GB bandwidth, custom domains, HTTPS. Zero signup friction for documentation, personal sites, and project pages.
Hidden Costs and Gotchas
Vercel Hobby plan bans commercial use
The most common gotcha in developer hosting. Vercel's Hobby plan terms prohibit commercial use — any project generating revenue, displaying ads, or serving a business needs Pro ($20/seat/month). This restriction is unique among hosting platforms. Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Render, and Railway all allow commercial use on free/entry tiers. Many developers build on Vercel Hobby and only discover this when they launch.
Railway is a trial, not a free tier
Railway's "free plan" is a one-time $5 credit lasting up to 30 days. After that, the Developer plan has a $1/month minimum. Don't start a project on Railway expecting permanent free hosting — plan for the transition to paid. That said, Railway's paid pricing is very competitive ($0.000463/min for 0.5 vCPU), and the trial is enough to build and validate an idea.
Render free tier cold starts (30–60 seconds)
Free web services spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity. The next request triggers a full restart: pull image, start process, wait for health check. This takes 30–60 seconds. For an API, this means the first user after any idle period waits a full minute. Acceptable for personal projects and dashboards, but not for production APIs or services with intermittent traffic.
Fly.io free tier is effectively gone for new accounts
New Fly.io accounts get a trial of 2 hours runtime OR 7 days, whichever comes first. The generous legacy free tier (3 shared VMs, 3 GB persistent storage) is only for pre-2025 accounts. Fly.io requires a credit card at signup. For new users, treat Fly.io as a paid platform with a brief demo mode.
Netlify credit math is tricky
300 credits/month sounds generous, but credits are consumed by multiple actions: builds (15 credits each), bandwidth (20 credits/GB), compute (10 credits/GB-hour), and web requests (2 credits/10K). A site with 10 builds/day and 20 GB bandwidth uses ~4,500 + 400 = 4,900 credits — well over the 300 limit. Sites pause on credit exhaustion.
PythonAnywhere blocks outbound internet
The free Beginner plan has no outbound internet access. Your web app cannot call external APIs, fetch data from other services, or make any HTTP requests to external hosts. This is a hard block, not a rate limit. Upgrade to the Hacker plan ($10/mo, was $5 before the tier restructuring in Jan 2026) for outbound access.
Pricing Change Timeline
Recent hosting and PaaS pricing changes tracked in our index.
Date
Provider
Change
Impact
effective Sep 30, 2026
AWS
AWS App Mesh end of support. Service mesh for ECS/EKS being fully retired. All configurations, virtual nodes, and routes will stop functioning. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 7, 2026 · effective date unknown
Vercel
The Hobby plan still exists, but several limits have been adjusted or are now pay-as-you-go. Edge Requests are now 1M included / month, then starting at $2 per 1M. Fast Data Transfer is 100 GB / month included, then starting at $0.15 per GB. Blob Storage is 1 GB / month included, then $0.023 per GB. Image Transformations are 5K / month included, then starting at $0.05 per 1K. Function Invocations are 1M / month included, then starting at $0.60 per 1M. Active CPU is 4 hours / month included, then starting at $0.128 per hour. Provisioned Memory is 360 GB-hrs / month included, then starting at $0.0106 per GB-hr. Source ↗
HIGH
discovered Sep 7, 2026 · effective date unknown
Netlify
The free tier now offers 300 credits/month. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 3, 2026 · effective date unknown
Railway
The free tier now has a $1/month minimum after the trial, and the number of projects is reduced to 1 after the trial. The free trial now offers 2 replicas instead of 1. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 2, 2026 · effective date unknown
Cloudflare Durable Objects
The free plan now only supports Durable Objects with SQLite storage backend. Also, the free tier limits for requests and duration have changed. Source ↗
HIGH
discovered Sep 2, 2026 · effective date unknown
Render
The free tier now includes compute options with varying RAM and CPU, and the limits for PostgreSQL and Key Value stores have been updated. Bandwidth for the Hobby tier is now 5GB included per month, then $0.15 per GB. Source ↗
HIGH
discovered Sep 1, 2026 · effective date unknown
Cloudflare Workers AI
The pricing has been restructured. While a free tier of 10,000 Neurons per day still exists, the pricing is now more granular and based on per-model unit pricing, billed in Neurons at $0.011 / 1,000 Neurons. Some models now require a paid plan or AI Gateway credits. Source ↗
HIGH
discovered Aug 28, 2026 · effective date unknown
Deno Deploy
Egress bandwidth for the free tier is now 20GiB, down from 100 GB. KV storage remains at 1 GiB, but the free tier now includes 1,000,000 KV read units and 500,000 KV write units. CPU time is now 10 hours, down from 15 hours. Revision storage is 10 GiB. Source ↗
HIGH
discovered Aug 28, 2026 · effective date unknown
flightcontrol.dev
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. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Aug 28, 2026 · effective date unknown
Awardspace.com
The free tier still exists. The description is more detailed. The free tier now explicitly states 5GB bandwidth and 1000MB Disk Space. The page also mentions a free website builder, 99.9% Uptime, and 24/7 support as part of the free tier. Source ↗
LOW
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. Source ↗
HIGH
discovered Aug 28, 2026 · effective date unknown
readthedocs.org
Read the Docs now offers two tiers: a free 'Community' plan for open-source projects and a paid 'Business' plan starting at $50/month for commercial projects. The free tier is specifically for open-source software and supports public documentation with ads. Private repository support and SSO are now paid features. Source ↗
HIGH
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, not re-checked since. 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.
Deno Deploy — We read that on 2026-09-09 from deno.com/deploy/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Deno Deploy as "deno deploy" and states "$0"
Netlify — We read that on 2026-09-07 from netlify.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Netlify as "netlify" and states "$0"
PythonAnywhere — We read that on 2026-09-09 from pythonanywhere.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names PythonAnywhere as "pythonanywhere" and states "$10"
Vercel — We read that on 2026-09-07 from vercel.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Vercel as "vercel" and states "$0"
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 60 Cloud Hosting services in our catalogue, each with the free tier terms and the date we last verified them. 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?
Free tier generosity varies by use case. Some providers offer more storage, others more compute or API calls. Our comparison table above shows exact limits side-by-side so you can evaluate based on what matters most for your workload.
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 provides exact numbers for each provider. Check the growth cost analysis section to understand what you'll pay when you exceed free tier limits.