March 2026 was a tough month for developer free tiers. With 12 negative changes versus 3 positive, the trend continues toward tighter limits and eliminated offerings. Developers relying on free tiers should review their dependencies.
20
Total Changes +3 vs last month
12
Negative +3 vs last month
3
Positive same as last month
5
Neutral
Changes by Type
Change Type
Count
Free Tier Removed
5
Restriction
3
Pricing Restructured
3
Product Deprecated
2
Limits Increased
2
Record Corrected
2
Pricing Model Change
1
Limits Reduced
1
New Free Tier
1
Biggest Losers
Vendors that eliminated or reduced free tiers
Netlify (1 negative change)
Every repo committer is now charged as a full Pro seat ($19/mo) when using Netlify CMS or Identity with a private repo. Previously only users who logged into the Netlify dashboard counted as seats
Postman (1 negative change)
Free plan now single-user only. Team collaboration (shared workspaces, collection sharing) requires paid plan at $19/user/month
Gemini 2.0 Flash and 2.0 Flash-Lite models deprecated, scheduled for retirement. Free tier continues with Gemini 2.5 models. Developers on 2.0 must migrate
Logz.io (1 negative change)
Free Community plan (1 GB/day, 1-day retention, 10 alerts) removed. Only 14-day free trial remains. Consumption-based pricing starts at $0.92/ingested GB/day
Xero Developer API (1 negative change)
Xero retiring revenue-share model, moving to 5-tier connection+egress pricing. No more free API access for developers. Costs jumping from ~$0 to $17K+/year for some. Also banning API data use for AI/ML model training
LocalStack (1 negative change)
LocalStack drops open-source Community Edition. Single unified image requires auth token. Free tier replaced with non-commercial-only tier requiring registration. Commercial use requires paid plan starting at $39/month
Freshping (1 negative change)
Freshping shut down entirely. Free accounts disabled March 6, 2026. Paid plans expire at end of term. All data deleted 90 days later (~June 4, 2026). No replacement product offered by Freshworks
Firebase (1 negative change)
Firebase Studio (formerly Project IDX) shut down March 19, 2026. Cloud IDE and AI code generation features discontinued. Existing projects accessible until March 2027 for migration
Dub.co (1 negative change)
Free tier link limit reduced 40x from 1,000 links to 25 new links/month. Added 30-day analytics retention limit and 1-user cap
Biggest Winners
Vendors that added or expanded free tiers
Unity DevOps (1 positive change)
Free tier significantly expanded: storage 5x increase to 25 GB, 100 GB egress added (new), per-seat charges removed. Unity DevOps (formerly Plastic SCM) now offers generous free version control for game developers
Anthropic Claude (1 positive change)
Temporary usage promotion: double five-hour usage limits during off-peak hours, March 13-27, 2026. Applies to Claude Pro and Team subscribers
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL (1 positive change)
Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless added to AWS Free Tier — managed PostgreSQL-compatible database now available at no cost with up to 4 ACUs per cluster and 1 GB storage. Part of AWS Free Plan (6 months + credits)