January 2026 leaned positive with 2 expansions versus 1 contractions. A welcome shift for cost-conscious developers.
15
Total Changes +11 vs last month
1
Negative same as last month
2
Positive -1 vs last month
12
Neutral
Changes by Type
Change Type
Count
Pricing Restructured
11
Limits Increased
2
Pricing Postponed
1
Limits Reduced
1
Biggest Losers
Vendors that eliminated or reduced free tiers
Google Programmable Search Engine (1 negative change)
Free full-web search being discontinued. Free tier restricted to max 50 domains per search engine. Migration deadline January 1, 2027
Biggest Winners
Vendors that added or expanded free tiers
Google Cloud (1 positive change)
Google for Startups Cloud Program now offers up to $350K GCP credits for AI-first startups, plus $10K Anthropic (Claude) partner credits via Model Garden
DigitalOcean (1 positive change)
20% price cut on Basic Droplets (cheapest now $4/mo from $5/mo). Per-second billing introduced (minimum 60 seconds or $0.01). Functions free tier increased to 25,000 GiB-seconds/mo