Koyeb Versus a Free Container Tier: The Card, the Tenth of a CPU, and the New Owner

Koyeb is the free tier people bring up when they want a serverless-style container platform with a real database attached: one free service, scale-to-zero, a Postgres that costs nothing for light use. It is a good product. It also asks for a credit card, gives you a tenth of a CPU, and since February 2026 belongs to Mistral AI, which changes what "free tier" means over the next year. This is a side-by-side with a free container tier that has none of those three properties, written to help you pick, not to win.

Koyeb's free tier, from its own FAQ

• One free web service per organisation: 512 MB of RAM, 0.1 vCPU, 2 GB of SSD, in Frankfurt or Washington.
• One free PostgreSQL with 1 GB of storage, limited to 5 hours of active compute a month; it sleeps after 5 minutes idle and wakes on the next query.
• A credit card is required "to prevent fraud and abuse", verified with a $29 pre-authorisation that is cancelled immediately and can take 7 to 21 days to disappear from a statement. Koyeb says it may skip the card when it can verify a human another way.
• Scale-to-zero after one hour without traffic on the free instance, and it cannot be disabled or tuned. Waking from deep sleep takes 1 to 5 seconds; a "light sleep" mode with roughly 200 ms wakes is in preview and free during the preview.
• Ownership: Mistral AI agreed to acquire Koyeb on 17 February 2026; the team joined Mistral in March and the platform is expected to become part of Mistral Compute. Koyeb says the service continues.

Side by side

Where Koyeb is the better choice

• One public service that must feel always-on. A wake of a few seconds is invisible to most users; a minute behind a wake page is not. If you have one app and it is public, Koyeb's idle model is friendlier.
• You want the free Postgres. Five active hours a month is little, but for a demo or a low-traffic app whose database sleeps most of the time it is a real database for nothing.
• A custom domain for free and a European region.

Where a SnapDeploy free container is the better choice

• No card. Students, people without a card, or anyone who does not want a hold on a statement for a hobby project.
• Several small things. Four containers against one service: an API, an admin tool, a preview and a bot, each visited occasionally.
• CPU. A quarter of a vCPU against a tenth. Anything that renders, resizes or builds per request feels the difference.
• Everything under one dashboard when you outgrow free: Always-On from $12, managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis and RabbitMQ next to the containers, with browser admin tools.

The Mistral question

An acquisition is not a shutdown, and Koyeb's platform is running as before while it is folded into Mistral's compute business. But a free tier at an infrastructure company owned by an AI model company will be judged by how it serves that business. If you build on Koyeb's free tier today, keep the deploy portable: a Dockerfile in the repository, environment variables you can export, a database you can dump. That advice is the same for any free tier, ours included; it is just more pointed when the owner has changed.

Moving between them

Both deploy a Dockerfile from a Git repository and both read PORT from the environment, so an app that runs on one runs on the other with no code change. Koyeb's free Postgres dumps with pg_dump through its public connection string; on the SnapDeploy side the database is an add-on with an injected DATABASE_URL, a $1 trial, or an external free plan. The only one-way detail is the card: leaving Koyeb does not require one, arriving does.

Reading the fine print on both

• Koyeb's light sleep is in preview and free while it is; Koyeb has said a light-sleeping instance will be billed at 15% of its running price once it is generally available. The free instance's one-hour deep sleep is the behaviour to plan for.
• Koyeb's free Postgres counts active compute, not wall-clock time: five hours a month of queries, with the database sleeping after five idle minutes. A dashboard that polls every minute will use the five hours quickly.
• SnapDeploy's 100 hours are container hours across all four containers, counted only while awake, on a rolling monthly window. Four containers that each sleep most of the day fit; one container kept awake by a ping does not.
• The card hold on Koyeb is cancelled immediately but can sit on a statement for up to three weeks; if that matters to you, it matters before sign-up, not after.

Try both in ten minutes

1. Put a Dockerfile in the repository that reads PORT and binds 0.0.0.0, with a /health route.
2. On Koyeb: create the free service from the repository, wait for the build, note the wake time after an hour idle.
3. On SnapDeploy: Containers → Deploy from GitHub → the same repository, wait for the build, note the wake page after 15 idle minutes.
4. Compare what you actually felt: the wake, the dashboard, the logs. The table above is the facts; the ten minutes are the preference.