Best free tier for hosting a project
Running something real without paying anything, permanently rather than for a trial period.
List prices checked
How this is scored
Only services with a published free allowance, ranked by what it costs to exceed it. The description column is the important one: a permanent free tier and a 12-month trial look identical on a pricing page and are not remotely the same thing a year from now.
All 54, ranked for this workload
| # | Service | Provider | Cost for this workload | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AWS CloudFront | Amazon Web Services | usage-billed after free tier | 1 TB egress and 10M requests per month, always free |
| 2 | Fastly | Fastly | usage-billed after free tier | 100 GB of bandwidth per month, permanently free |
| 3 | Bunny CDN | bunny.net | usage-billed after free tier | 14-day trial, then a $1 monthly minimum |
| 4 | KeyCDN | KeyCDN | usage-billed after free tier | $10 of trial credit; $4 monthly minimum thereafter |
| 5 | CDN77 | CDN77 | usage-billed after free tier | 14-day trial with 1 TB of traffic |
| 6 | AWS EC2 | Amazon Web Services | usage-billed after free tier | 750 hours per month of a t-class micro instance for 12 months |
| 7 | Google Compute Engine | usage-billed after free tier | One e2-micro instance per month, always free | |
| 8 | Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft | usage-billed after free tier | 750 hours per month of a B1s instance for 12 months |
| 9 | Oracle Cloud Compute | Oracle | usage-billed after free tier | 4 Arm cores, 24 GB RAM, and 10 TB egress per month, always free |
| 10 | AWS S3 | Amazon Web Services | usage-billed after free tier | 5 GB of standard storage for 12 months |
| 11 | Cloudflare R2 | Cloudflare | usage-billed after free tier | 10 GB-month of storage, plus zero egress fees at any volume |
| 12 | Backblaze B2 | Backblaze | usage-billed after free tier | 10 GB of storage, with free egress up to 3x data stored |
| 13 | Google Cloud Storage | usage-billed after free tier | 5 GB-month always free in US regions | |
| 14 | Azure Blob Storage | Microsoft | usage-billed after free tier | 5 GB of hot block storage for 12 months |
| 15 | Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage | Wasabi | usage-billed after free tier | 30-day trial; no egress or API request charges |
| 16 | IDrive e2 | IDrive | usage-billed after free tier | 10 GB free, with egress included up to 3x stored data |
| 17 | Storj | Storj | usage-billed after free tier | 25 GB of storage and 25 GB of egress per month |
| 18 | Scaleway Object Storage | Scaleway | usage-billed after free tier | 75 GB of egress free every month |
| 19 | Oracle Object Storage | Oracle | usage-billed after free tier | 20 GB of storage, always free |
| 20 | AWS Lambda | Amazon Web Services | usage-billed after free tier | 1M requests and 400,000 GB-seconds per month, always free |
| 21 | Google Cloud Run | usage-billed after free tier | 2M requests and 180,000 vCPU-seconds per month | |
| 22 | Azure Functions | Microsoft | usage-billed after free tier | 1M executions and 400,000 GB-seconds per month |
| 23 | Vultr Cloud Compute | Vultr | then $2.50/mo | None; the $2.50 IPv6-only plan is the entry point |
| 24 | Hetzner Cloud | Hetzner | then $3.79/mo | 20 TB of traffic included with every server |
| 25 | DigitalOcean Droplets | DigitalOcean | then $4.00/mo | 500 GB to 1 TB of pooled egress per Droplet |
| 26 | IONOS Cloud Servers | IONOS | then $4.00/mo | Unlimited traffic included |
| 27 | OVHcloud VPS | OVHcloud | then $4.20/mo | Unmetered traffic on most VPS plans |
| 28 | Gcore CDN | Gcore | then $5.00/mo | 1 TB per month on the free CDN plan |
| 29 | Linode (Akamai Cloud) | Akamai | then $5.00/mo | 1 TB of egress included on the $5 plan |
| 30 | AWS Lightsail | Amazon Web Services | then $5.00/mo | Three months free on the smallest plan |
| 31 | Cloudflare Workers | Cloudflare | then $5.00/mo | 100,000 requests per day, always free |
| 32 | Railway | Railway | then $5.00/mo | $5 of usage included on the Hobby plan |
| 33 | Heroku | Heroku | then $5.00/mo | None; the free dyno tier ended in November 2022 |
| 34 | DigitalOcean App Platform | DigitalOcean | then $5.00/mo | Three free static sites |
| 35 | Contabo VPS | Contabo | then $5.50/mo | Unlimited traffic, throttled after 32 TB |
| 36 | Koyeb | Koyeb | then $6.40/mo | One free instance with limited resources |
| 37 | Render | Render | then $7.00/mo | Free static sites and 750 instance hours per month |
| 38 | Turso | Turso | then $8.25/mo | 500 databases, 9 GB of storage, and 1 billion row reads per month |
| 39 | Netlify | Netlify | then $9.00/mo | Free plan with a 300 credit monthly limit |
| 40 | MongoDB Atlas | MongoDB | then $9.00/mo | M0 shared cluster with 512 MB, always free |
| 41 | Upstash Redis | Upstash | then $10/mo | 500,000 commands per month |
| 42 | DigitalOcean Kubernetes | DigitalOcean | then $12/mo | Control plane free on the standard tier |
| 43 | AWS RDS for PostgreSQL | Amazon Web Services | then $12/mo | 750 hours per month of a db.t-class instance for 12 months |
| 44 | Azure Database for PostgreSQL | Microsoft | then $12/mo | 750 hours per month of a burstable instance for 12 months |
| 45 | Netlify Functions | Netlify | then $19/mo | 125,000 invocations and 100 hours of runtime per month |
| 46 | Neon Serverless Postgres | Neon | then $19/mo | 0.5 GB of storage and 190 compute hours per month |
| 47 | Cloudflare CDN | Cloudflare | then $20/mo | Unmetered CDN bandwidth on every plan including free |
| 48 | Vercel Functions | Vercel | then $20/mo | Included in the Hobby plan within usage limits |
| 49 | Deno Deploy | Deno | then $20/mo | 1M requests and 100 GB of outbound data per month |
| 50 | Vercel | Vercel | then $20/mo | Hobby plan with 100 GB of transfer per month |
| 51 | Supabase | Supabase | then $25/mo | 500 MB database and 5 GB of egress per month |
| 52 | CockroachDB Cloud | Cockroach Labs | then $25/mo | $0 basic tier with monthly request-unit and storage allowances |
| 53 | PlanetScale | PlanetScale | then $39/mo | None; the Hobby tier was retired in April 2024 |
| 54 | Fastly Compute | Fastly | then $50/mo | Trial credit only |
Published list prices only. Rows that do not publish a rate for an axis this workload depends on are excluded rather than shown as cheap.
Questions
- Best free tier for hosting a project in 2026?
- AWS CloudFront from Amazon Web Services — usage-billed after free tier. Fastly is second at usage-billed after free tier. This ranking is specific to the workload described above; a different usage shape reorders it.
- How is this ranking weighted?
- Only services with a published free allowance, ranked by what it costs to exceed it. The description column is the important one: a permanent free tier and a 12-month trial look identical on a pricing page and are not remotely the same thing a year from now.
- Why does this differ from the general cheapest list?
- Because a single price axis never describes a real workload. Ranking by headline rate answers "who is cheapest per unit"; this page answers "who is cheapest for this job", and the two orders are often very different — which is the whole reason it exists as a separate table.
- What is not accounted for?
- Committed-use discounts, regional price variation, per-request charges, support plans, and minimum retention. These are published list prices applied to one stated workload — a shortlist to price properly with the vendor, not a quotation.
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