April 2026 was a tough month for developer free tiers. With 19 negative changes versus 3 positive, the trend continues toward tighter limits and eliminated offerings. Developers relying on free tiers should review their dependencies.
25
Total Changes +4 vs last month
19
Negative +3 vs last month
3
Positive same as last month
3
Neutral
Changes by Type
Change Type
Count
Pricing Restructured
7
Limits Reduced
7
Product Deprecated
3
Limits Increased
2
Pricing Model Change
2
Free Tier Removed
2
New Tier
1
Restriction
1
Biggest Losers
Vendors whose changes cost users more
OVHcloud (2 negative changes: pricing changed)
OVHcloud raised prices on its VPS 2026 range from 2026-04-01. Its announcement of 2026-03-05 lists euro list prices up 36-49%, with VPS-1 from €4.49 to €6.49 a month and VPS-4 from €24.99 to €36.99; existing services moved at the end of their current term. New orders had moved already: the US page's 12-month price for VPS-1 went from $4.20 to $6.46 between captures of 2026-02-23 and 2026-03-04. Source ↗
OVHcloud Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Bare Metal prices increased 9-11% for deployments made 2026-2028. Pre-2025 deployments see smaller 2-6% increase depending on equipment age. IPv4 pricing also increased. Driven by same DRAM/NVMe cost surge as VPS increases. Source ↗
Hetzner (1 negative change: paid pricing changed)
Hetzner raised prices on 2026-04-01 for new orders and existing products: cloud servers by 30-37% (CX23 €2.99 to €3.99 a month in Germany and Finland), load balancers by 31-39%, Object Storage's base price by 30%, dedicated servers by 2-21% and Server Auction servers by 3%. Superseded 2026-06-15: Hetzner ran a second adjustment across all cloud and dedicated lines, applying to new orders and rescales only. Read from hetzner.com on 2026-09-03: CX23 is €5.99 and is marked "not available", as is every other Cost-Optimized plan, and the cheapest orderable plan is CPX12 at €11.99/mo. Source ↗
Render (1 negative change: free tier reduced)
Render replaced its workspace plans. Bandwidth for the Hobby tier went from 100 GB to 5 GB included per month, then $0.15 per GB, and Hobby workspaces are now capped at 25 services. New workspaces got the new plans on 2026-04-23 and existing workspaces moved on 2026-08-01. Free web services, Postgres and Key Value kept their specs, and free web services draw on the workspace's included bandwidth. Source ↗
Google Gemini API (1 negative change: new free-tier restriction)
Google began enforcing billing-account-level spend caps on April 1, 2026. When a tier's spend cap is reached, API requests pause until the next billing month. Affects pay-as-you-go developers who may see unexpected request pausing. Source ↗
Replit (1 negative change: pricing changed)
Replit Core plan dropped from $25/month to $20/month (now includes 5 collaborators). New Pro plan added at $100/month with Agent modes, tiered credits, and up to 15 builders. Teams plan sunset (auto-migrated to Pro). Free tier unchanged (limited AI credits, basic compute) Source ↗
DeepSeek (1 negative change: pricing changed)
DeepSeek V3.2 replaces V4 branding. Pricing dropped: chat model $0.30→$0.28/M input, $0.50→$0.42/M output. Reasoner model pricing unified with chat at $0.28/$0.42 (was $0.55/$2.19). Free token welcome package appears removed. Source ↗
Netlify (1 negative change: pricing changed)
Netlify changed its credit rates: bandwidth went from 10 to 20 credits per GB and compute from 5 to 10 credits per GB-hour, while web requests went from 3 to 2 credits per 10,000. The Free plan keeps 300 credits a month, so each credit buys half as much bandwidth and compute. Source ↗
Qwen Code's free Qwen OAuth tier was discontinued on 2026-04-15, and new requests on it are rejected. Qwen's docs point users to Alibaba Cloud Coding Plan, OpenRouter, Fireworks AI or another provider. Source ↗
ImageEngine withdrew its free Developer Program (10 GB of monthly traffic, one image origin) between captures of 2026-02-17 and 2026-04-09, when it replaced its SaaS plans with self-hosted ImageEngine Kube. The programme's page now redirects to a 30-day free trial with no credit card required. Source ↗
X (Twitter) (1 negative change: paid pricing changed)
X API per-request pricing overhaul: Owned Reads now $0.001/request; writes raised to $0.015/post (from ~$0.01); URL-containing posts now $0.20/post (massive increase). Following, likes, and quote-posts via API removed from all self-serve tiers. Announced on X Developer Community. Source ↗
Comet ML (1 negative change: free tier limits reduced)
Between 2026-03-23 and 2026-04-14, Comet cut the team members allowed on Opik Free Cloud from unlimited to 10. Source ↗
DigitalOcean's new-account credit fell from $200 for 60 days to $5 for 90 days. Its pricing page changed between the Internet Archive's 2026-04-05 and 2026-04-07 captures. The $200 offer page (try.digitalocean.com/freetrialoffer/) was still up on 2026-05-15 and now redirects to the homepage. Source ↗
Egress on the Free plan fell from 100 GB to 20 GB a month. Deno Deploy's pricing page changed between Common Crawl captures of 2026-03-15 and 2026-04-12. Source ↗
Appwrite began enforcing Realtime limits on 2026-04-30, with the Free plan at 2 million messages a month, down from the 3 million its pricing page had listed, and a new 256 KB maximum message size. It announced the enforcement on 2026-03-23. Source ↗
Kiro reopened its startup credits with smaller tiers and a lower funding ceiling. Its post of 2026-04-07 offers up to one year of Kiro Pro+ to "early-stage to Series A" startups in tiers of up to 2, 10 and 30 users, and says "Startups who currently participate in AWS Activate are not eligible". The 2025 offer covered startups up to Series B in tiers of up to 2, 50 and 100 users; Kiro had closed its applications in December 2025 "due to high demand". Source ↗
Amplitude cut its free Starter plan from up to 10M to up to 2M events a month between the Internet Archive's copies of its pricing page from 2026-04-12 and 2026-04-27. The 10K MTU limit stayed. Source ↗
Biggest Winners
Vendors that added or expanded free tiers
Hyperping (1 positive change)
Between 2026-03-08 and 2026-04-08, Hyperping's free plan went from 5 monitors checked every 3 minutes to 20 monitors checked every 5 minutes, with 1 basic status page and 1 seat. Paid plans did not change. Source ↗
OpenAI Codex (1 positive change)
OpenAI added Codex-only seats for ChatGPT Business and Enterprise workspaces, with no fixed seat fee, no rate limits and usage billed on token consumption, and cut ChatGPT Business's annual price from $25 to $20 per seat. Standard Business seats, which include Codex with usage limits, continued. Source ↗
Netlify (1 positive change)
Form submissions are now free across all Credit plans (including the Credit Free tier) — previously each form submission cost 1 credit. Credit Pro also gained unlimited team seats (was $20/seat per Git contributor), which effectively removes the prior CMS/Identity 'every committer becomes a $19 Pro seat' gotcha for free-tier users who ever upgrade. Source ↗
Deprecations and Other Changes
Changes counted as neither negative nor positive, such as products and models retired or closed to new users
AWS (product deprecated 2026-04-20)
Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client stopped accepting new customers on 2026-04-20. Existing customers can keep using their devices, and can still order more, until AWS ends support on 2027-03-31. Source ↗
AWS (product deprecated 2026-04-30)
AWS App Runner closed to new customers. Service enters maintenance mode with no new features. AWS recommends migrating to Amazon ECS Express Mode for simplified container deployment. Source ↗
AWS (product deprecated 2026-04-30)
The Node.js 20 Lambda runtime (nodejs20.x) was deprecated on 2026-04-30. Lambda blocks creating functions on it from 2027-07-29 and updating them from 2027-08-31; AWS's runtime page says "you can continue to invoke your functions indefinitely". Source ↗