Free-tier hosting, honestly compared
25 of our 41 platforms have a genuine free tier — but "free" hides a lot. These are the catches most "best free hosting" lists skip: which ones spin down when idle, which have closed signups, and which need a credit card. Read the caveat before you build on it.
Managed PaaS
- DigitalOcean App Platformpaid from ~$5/mo
Free tier covers static sites only; web services, workers, jobs and databases require a paid plan.
Free-tier details → - Northflankpaid from ~$12/mo
Free Sandbox tier exists, but a payment method is required to create any resources.
Free-tier details → - Renderpaid from ~$7/mo
Free instance spins down after ~15 min idle (not always-on, ~1 min cold start) and is capped at 750 instance-hours/month per workspace — fine for demos, not 24/7 production.
Free-tier details →
Static / Jamstack
AWS restructured its free tier in 2025 to a credit-based plan that expires — not a perpetual free tier.
Free-tier details →Free tier available — see the platform page for the current limits.
Free-tier details →Free tier available — see the platform page for the current limits.
Free-tier details →Free tier available — see the platform page for the current limits.
Free-tier details →
Container hosting
Perpetual monthly free allowance: 2M requests, 180,000 vCPU-seconds, 360,000 GiB-seconds of memory, and 1 GiB of North America egress.
Free-tier details →
Self-hosted PaaS
Free tier available — see the platform page for the current limits.
Free-tier details →Free tier available — see the platform page for the current limits.
Free-tier details →Free tier available — see the platform page for the current limits.
Free-tier details →Free tier available — see the platform page for the current limits.
Free-tier details →
Managed database
Free tier available — see the platform page for the current limits.
Free-tier details →The free Spark plan has fixed daily/monthly quotas (e.g. ~50K Firestore reads, 20K writes, 20K deletes per day and 1 GiB stored); exceeding them requires the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan.
Free-tier details →Free tier available — see the platform page for the current limits.
Free-tier details →Free tier available — see the platform page for the current limits.
Free-tier details →Free tier available — see the platform page for the current limits.
Free-tier details →Free tier available — see the platform page for the current limits.
Free-tier details →
Object storage
12-month new-account free tier (5 GB S3 Standard) plus some always-free allowances; standard egress is billed per GB after the first 100 GB/month.
Free-tier details →First 10 GB of storage free; egress free up to 3x your stored data per month (and free to Bandwidth Alliance partners like Cloudflare/Bunny).
Free-tier details →10 GB of storage plus monthly Class A/B operation allowances free — and zero egress fees on all usage.
Free-tier details →
Monitoring / Uptime
Free tier covers a set of monitors, a status page and basic on-call; paid plans add more monitors, log retention and seats.
Free-tier details →Free tier includes a monthly allowance of API and browser check runs; paid plans scale runs, retention and seats.
Free-tier details →Free and open source — you self-host it (a $5/mo VPS is plenty); no per-monitor fees.
Free-tier details →The free plan monitors many endpoints at 5-minute intervals with basic alerting; paid plans add 1-minute checks, more monitors and advanced alerts.
Free-tier details →
Free tiers change often (Heroku removed theirs; Koyeb closed signups). We re-verify and date every entry — see how we check and the open dataset. Some outbound links may be affiliate links (disclosure).