January 2026 was a tough month for developer free tiers. With 10 negative changes versus 2 positive, the trend continues toward tighter limits and eliminated offerings. Developers relying on free tiers should review their dependencies.
PythonAnywhere dropped its $5-a-month Hacker plan, so the base paid plan is $10 a month. New free accounts lost MySQL and scheduled tasks; unused free web apps now expire after 1 month instead of 3. Source ↗
Atlassian Forge (1 negative change: new free-tier restriction)
Forge platform moved from free to consumption-based billing for compute and storage Source ↗
Fly.io (1 negative change: paid pricing changed)
Volume snapshots now billed — previously free automatic snapshots now cost $0.08/GB-month Source ↗
SQLite storage billing began for Durable Objects — previously free during beta Source ↗
Vercel (1 negative change: pricing changed)
Pro plan moved to credit-based model ($20/mo credit pool), Hobby plan metrics renamed and restructured — bandwidth→Fast Data Transfer, serverless split into Active CPU + Provisioned Memory, Blob Storage and Image Transformations added Source ↗
AWS (1 negative change: paid pricing changed)
EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML GPU prices increased ~15% across regions. p5e.48xlarge went from $34.61 to $39.80/hr (US East) and $43.26 to $49.75/hr (US West N. California) Source ↗
Google (1 negative change: pricing changed)
Google began folding Google Developer Program Premium's benefits, including Google Cloud credits, into Google AI Pro ($19.99 a month, $10 a month in credits) and AI Ultra ($100 a month in credits) for personal (@gmail.com) accounts. 1:1 consultations, certification vouchers and unlimited Google Skills access are not included. Source ↗
Google Programmable Search Engine (1 negative change: new free-tier restriction)
Free full-web search being discontinued. Free tier restricted to max 50 domains per search engine. Migration deadline January 1, 2027 Source ↗
Docker Desktop subscription prices increased 67-80% across all tiers. Personal $7→$11, Pro $9→$14, Team $15→$24, Business $24→$35 per user/month. Separate from Docker Hub registry pricing changes Source ↗
Appwrite cut its Free plan from five functions per project to two. Projects that already had more keep them, but cannot create new functions until they are under the limit. Source ↗
Biggest Winners
Vendors that added or expanded free tiers
GitHub Actions (1 positive change)
Self-hosted runner per-minute fee ($0.002/min) announced for March 2026 was postponed indefinitely after community backlash. Self-hosted runners remain free. Separately, hosted runner prices were reduced up to 39% (Jan 2026) Source ↗
DigitalOcean (1 positive change)
Droplets moved from hourly to per-second billing (with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher) Source ↗