February 2026 was a tough month for developer free tiers. With 18 negative changes versus 1 positive, the trend continues toward tighter limits and eliminated offerings. Developers relying on free tiers should review their dependencies.
Pay-per-use pricing model introduced alongside existing fixed tiers. Legacy free tier users migrated to pay-per-use with $10 voucher. Free tier effectively reduced to proof-of-concept only (~500 posts/month read, no search) Source ↗
X replaced its Legacy Free API tier with pay-per-use pricing, announced 2026-02-06. Recently active free-tier users moved to pay-per-use with a one-time $10 voucher. Only apps X classifies as Public Utility Apps keep free scaled access. Source ↗
Premium request model introduced across all tiers. Free: 50/mo, Pro: 300, Pro+: 1,500, Business: 300/user, Enterprise: 1,000/user. Overage at $0.04/request. Advanced reasoning models consume 5x-20x per interaction Source ↗
Brave Search API (1 negative change: free tier limits reduced)
Brave replaced its free plan's 2,000 queries a month with $5 of free credit a month on each plan. Search costs $5 per 1,000 requests, so the credit covers 1,000 Search requests. The credit requires attributing the Brave Search API on the project's website. Source ↗
Spotify API (1 negative change: new free-tier restriction)
Premium subscription now required for development mode, test users cut from 25 to 5 Source ↗
Stripe (1 negative change: paid pricing changed)
Managed Payments (Merchant of Record) service entering general availability — Stripe handles tax, billing, fraud, and disputes Source ↗
Atlassian (1 negative change: pricing changed)
Data Center pricing increased 15-40% across Jira, Confluence, and JSM. New DC licenses end March 30 — cloud mandatory for new customers Source ↗
MinIO marked its open-source repository "NO LONGER MAINTAINED" on 2026-02-12 and archived it on 2026-02-13, ending the AGPL community edition with no further bug fixes or security patches. Development continues in the commercially licensed MinIO AIStor. Community releases had been source-only since 2025-10-15, and the repository had been in maintenance mode since 2025-12-03. Source ↗
Microsoft Partner Developer Benefits (1 negative change: pricing changed)
Per-user monthly Azure credits eliminated, replaced with organization-level bulk Azure credits. Visual Studio license in all benefit tiers now exclusively VS Enterprise IDE Source ↗
Firebase (1 negative change: new free-tier restriction)
Cloud Storage for Firebase now requires the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan, in effect from February 3, 2026. Projects on the no-cost Spark plan lose access to all Cloud Storage buckets, including default buckets; console access redirects to an upgrade page and API calls return 402 or 403. Provisioning a new default bucket also requires Blaze. Source ↗
Vercel (1 negative change: pricing changed)
New Pro projects now default to Turbo build machines (30 vCPUs, 60GB memory) at $0.126/minute — 9x more expensive than Standard machines ($0.014/min). Pro plan still $20/seat/month with $20 usage credit, but real-world build costs for moderate teams can hit $400+/month. Standard machines still available but must be manually selected. Source ↗
Xata Lite (1 negative change: product ends; its free plan ends with it)
Xata retired Xata Lite, its original serverless platform with a 15 GB free plan, on 2026-02-28. It announced the retirement and closed Lite sign-ups by 2025-12-08. Source ↗
Between 2026-02-10 and 2026-02-28, incidenthub.cloud cut its free tier from 10 monitors to 5 and dropped its status page; Discord and Slack integration remained. It had cut the free tier from 20 monitors to 10 in October 2025. Source ↗
MeScrum (1 negative change: product ends; its free plan ends with it)
MeuScrum, a free scrum and kanban tool, was replaced by a holding page between 2026-01-15 and 2026-02-07. Its login and signup pages are gone. Source ↗
Conversion Tools cut registered free users from 30 to 10 conversions a day (300 to 100 a month) between captures of 2025-12-02 and 2026-02-16. By 2026-05-14, users who don't register had 5 a day, down from 10. File size limits stayed at 20 MB and 10 MB. Source ↗
Appwrite began pausing Free projects after 7 consecutive days with no development activity. Its pricing page had said Free projects were "Never paused" until January 2026, and users reported pauses from 2026-03-09. Source ↗
Koyeb (1 negative change: free tier removed)
Koyeb withdrew its free Starter plan from new users after announcing on 2026-02-17 that it is joining Mistral AI: new users "must subscribe to one of our paid plans to get started", from Pro at $29 a month plus compute. Starter was on koyeb.com/pricing in the Internet Archive's capture of 2026-02-19 and gone by 2026-02-26. Organizations already on Starter keep it. Source ↗
Amplitude cut its free Starter plan from 50K to 10K monthly tracked users (MTUs) between the Internet Archive's copies of its pricing page from 2026-01-24 and 2026-02-14. The plan still allowed up to 10M events a month. Source ↗
Biggest Winners
Vendors that added or expanded free tiers
Cloudflare Queues (1 positive change)
Queues added to Workers free plan — message queuing now free Source ↗