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A DATED, SOURCED REFERENCE
What each hosting free tier actually includes, whether it needs a credit card, when it sleeps, and what changed. Read from each provider's own pricing or documentation page on the date shown, and kept current on this page rather than rewritten as a new article.
Last verified: 26 to 28 September 2026. Rows carry their own date. SnapDeploy appears as one row, held to the same standard as the others.
Cite as: "State of Free Hosting 2026", SnapDeploy, snapdeploy.dev/state-of-free-hosting, retrieved on the date you read it. Reuse the tables with attribution.
People ask which cloud provider has the best free tier as if there were one answer. There are three, depending on whether you host files, functions or a running process.
Free backend hosting, in other words: anything that runs a long-lived process, an API, a web app, a bot, a Docker container. A free tier comparison for this category has to include the sleep rule, because every row has one.
| Host | Free tier | RAM / CPU | Sleep or stop rule | Card | The catch | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SnapDeploy | 4 containers, 100 container-hours/month, 10 deploys/day; no expiry | 512 MB / 0.25 vCPU | Sleeps after 15 min idle; ~60 s wake on a browser visit; scripts do not wake it | No | Custom domains and WebSockets need Always-On ($12/mo); no persistent disk | 28 Sep 2026 |
| Render | 750 instance-hours/month per workspace; free Postgres expires after 30 days | 512 MB / 0.1 CPU | Spins down after 15 min without inbound traffic; about a minute to wake | No | Hobby workspace: 5 GB bandwidth/month then $0.15/GB (was 100 GB before 23 Apr 2026), 25 services, 2 custom domains; "not for production" | 28 Sep 2026 |
| Railway | $5 one-time credit for 30 days, then Free plan: $1/month credit, no rollover | Trial 1 GB / shared vCPU; Free plan up to 0.5 GB per service | Credit runs out; sleeping is opt-in | No for trial and Free; yes for paid plans | Free plan: 1 project, 3 services, 0 custom domains; Hobby $5/month | 28 Sep 2026 |
| Koyeb | 1 free web service per organisation, Frankfurt or Washington only; free Postgres 5 compute-hours/month | 512 MB / 0.1 vCPU, 2 GB SSD | Scales to zero after 1 h idle; wakes in seconds | Yes, $29 pre-authorisation hold | Card-free Hobby plan removed Feb 2026; sign-up defaults to Pro $29/month incl. $10 compute; no workers or volumes on free | 28 Sep 2026 |
| Fly.io | None. Trial: 2 machine-hours or 7 days, whichever first | Up to 2 vCPU / 4 GB on the trial | Trial machines auto-stop after 5 min; apps stop when the trial ends | Yes, to keep anything running | Free allowances ended 7 Oct 2024; cheapest machine about $1.94/month | 28 Sep 2026 |
| Heroku | None since 28 Nov 2022 | Eco: 512 MB | Eco ($5, 1,000 shared hours) sleeps after 30 min; Basic ($7) never sleeps | Yes | Postgres Essential-0 $5, Key-Value Mini $3 | 26 Sep 2026 |
| Zeabur | Free plan, $0, with auto-sleep | Not stated on the plan page | Auto-sleep | No | Old free plan replaced by the Serverless plan on 23 Oct 2023 | 26 Sep 2026 |
| Back4App Containers | 1 free container, 100 GB transfer | 256 MB / 0.25 shared CPU | Their template notes say a free container lives 60 minutes per deploy | No | Shared plan from $5/month; the "600 hours" figure repeated online is not on any official page | 26 Sep 2026 |
| PythonAnywhere | 1 web app on username.pythonanywhere.com, 100 CPU-seconds/day | 512 MB | Free account expires after 1 month unused (since Jan 2026) | No | WSGI only, no Docker; MySQL and scheduled tasks moved to paid for new free accounts; paid from $10 | 26 Sep 2026 |
| Google Cloud Run | Always free: 180,000 vCPU-seconds, 360,000 GiB-seconds, 2 million requests/month (request-based billing) | Per request | Scales to zero by default | Yes, a billing account is required | Allowance is per billing account; anything above it is billed | 26 Sep 2026 |
| AWS Lambda | Always free: 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds/month | Per function | On demand | Yes | Since 15 Jul 2025 new accounts choose a Free plan whose credits expire after 6 months, after which the account closes, or a Paid plan | 26 Sep 2026 |
| Azure Container Apps | 180,000 vCPU-seconds, 360,000 GiB-seconds, 2 million requests/month | Per request | Scales to zero | Yes, plus a phone number and a $1 hold | $200 credit for 30 days on a new account | 26 Sep 2026 |
| Oracle Cloud | Always Free: 2 OCPUs and 12 GB total across Arm A1 instances, plus up to two AMD micro VMs | As stated | Idle instances may be reclaimed after 7 days below 20 % use | Yes, card and phone; no prepaid cards | Was 4 OCPUs and 24 GB until 15 Jun 2026; "out of host capacity" is common | 26 Sep 2026 |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | 3 static-site apps, 1 GiB transfer each; no free container | Cheapest container $5/month (512 MiB) | Static only on free | A payment method is required | Basic and Professional tiers were removed | 26 Sep 2026 |
These do not sleep, because nothing runs until a request arrives.
| Host | Free tier | Custom domain | Card | The catch | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Pages | Unlimited sites, requests and bandwidth; 500 builds/month, 1 concurrent | 100 per project | No | 20,000 files, 25 MiB per file; Cloudflare now recommends starting new projects on Workers | 28 Sep 2026 |
| Cloudflare Workers | 100,000 requests/day, 10 ms CPU per request, 100 Workers; D1 database 5 GB | Yes | No | JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust and Python via the Workers runtime, not arbitrary containers | 26 Sep 2026 |
| GitHub Pages | 1 GB site, 100 GB/month soft bandwidth, 10 builds/hour | Yes, with HTTPS | No | Public repositories only on GitHub Free; no server-side code; not for running a business site | 28 Sep 2026 |
| Netlify | 300 credits/month, hard limit; bandwidth 20 credits/GB, a production deploy 15 credits | Yes, with SSL | No | Credit-based since 4 Sep 2025; a project pauses at 0 credits; the old 100 GB and 300 build minutes apply only to accounts created before then | 28 Sep 2026 |
| Vercel Hobby | 100 GB data transfer, 1 million edge requests, 1 million function invocations, 100 deployments/day | 50 per project | No stated requirement | Non-commercial use only; no repositories owned by a Git organisation; only 3 recent production deployments retained since 16 Sep 2026 | 28 Sep 2026 |
| Firebase Hosting | 10 GB storage, 360 MB/day transfer | Yes, with SSL | No | About 10 GB of transfer a month; low for media-heavy sites | 28 Sep 2026 |
| Host | Free tier | Sleep rule | The catch | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Streamlit Community Cloud | Unlimited public apps, one private app; roughly 0.078 to 2 CPU cores and 690 MB to 2.7 GB RAM (their Feb 2024 figures) | Hibernates after 12 hours without traffic; any viewer can wake it | GitHub account with admin rights on the repository required; hosted in the US only | 28 Sep 2026 |
| Hugging Face Spaces | Static Spaces free; Gradio and Docker Spaces need PRO ($9/month) or Team; free personal accounts may host up to 2 Gradio Spaces on ZeroGPU; CPU Basic 2 vCPU, 16 GB | Free hardware sleeps after 48 hours idle; a visitor restarts it | Protected and private visibility are paid features; no Streamlit SDK option any more | 28 Sep 2026 |
The deploy steps for both frameworks on a container are on the Streamlit and Gradio hosting page.
The free-tier timeline since the Heroku free tier ended in 2022, from the providers' own announcements. Items marked with an asterisk rest on a secondary source because the original page is gone.
| Date | Platform | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Nov 2022 | Heroku | Free dynos, Postgres and Redis discontinued |
| 1 Aug 2023 | Railway | Starter free plan sunset, replaced by a one-time $5 trial |
| 23 Oct 2023 | Zeabur | Old free plan replaced by the Serverless plan; a $0 plan with auto-sleep remains |
| 1 Feb 2024 | Koyeb | $5.50 monthly credit removed; one free instance instead |
| May 2024 * | Cyclic.sh | Shut down; free tier off 10 May, all usage 31 May |
| 20 May 2024 | Render | Free Postgres expiry cut from 90 to 30 days |
| 7 Oct 2024 | Fly.io | Plans and free allowances deprecated for new customers |
| 17 Oct 2024 * | Deta Space | Sunset; apps and data deleted |
| 8 Jul 2025 | Glitch | Project hosting shut down |
| 15 Jul 2025 | AWS | New accounts choose a Free plan with expiring credits or a Paid plan; the 12-month free tier only for older accounts |
| 27 Aug 2025 | Railway | Free plan brought back: $1 of credit a month after the trial |
| 4 Sep 2025 | Netlify | Credit-based plans for new accounts; Free = 300 credits a month; rates rebalanced 14 Apr 2026 |
| Jan 2026 | PythonAnywhere | Free accounts expire after 1 month unused; MySQL and scheduled tasks paid for new free accounts |
| Feb 2026 | Koyeb | Card-free Hobby plan removed; card with a $29 hold required |
| 23 Apr 2026 | Render | Hobby plan bandwidth cut to 5 GB a month; Pro $25 flat; migration 1 Aug 2026 |
| 15 Jun 2026 * | Oracle Cloud | Always Free Arm halved to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB; changed in the docs without an announcement |
| Jul 2026 * | Hugging Face | Gradio and Docker Spaces require a paid plan; Static Spaces stay free |
| 16 Sep 2026 | Vercel | Hobby projects keep only 3 recent production deployments |
Every figure comes from the provider's own pricing page, documentation or changelog, read on the date in the row. Nothing on this page comes from a third-party listicle. Where the original page is gone, the timeline says so with an asterisk. Corrections are welcome by email to the address on the contact page; a correction changes the row and its date, not a new article.
Sources: render.com/docs/free, render.com/pricing, render.com/changelog (20 May 2024, 23 Apr 2026); docs.railway.com free-trial, plans and FAQ pages, blog.railway.com (free plan, 27 Aug 2025); koyeb.com/docs (instances, organizations, pricing FAQ, scale-to-zero), koyeb.com/pricing; fly.io/docs/about/free-trial, docs.fly.io discontinued-plans, fly.io/pricing; heroku.com/blog/next-chapter, devcenter.heroku.com dyno types; zeabur.com/docs pricing free-plan; back4app.com/pricing/container-as-a-service; pythonanywhere.com/pricing, help.pythonanywhere.com FreeAccountsFeatures; cloud.google.com/run/pricing, docs.cloud.google.com/free; aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing, aws.amazon.com/free; azure.microsoft.com container-apps pricing; docs.oracle.com Always Free resources; digitalocean.com/pricing/app-platform; developers.cloudflare.com (Pages limits 5 Sep 2026, Workers limits, D1), cloudflare.com/products/pages; docs.github.com GitHub Pages limits and About GitHub Pages; netlify.com/pricing, docs.netlify.com credit-based plans; vercel.com/docs/limits (16 Sep 2026), fair-use guidelines (14 Sep 2026), vercel.com/changelog (16 Sep 2026); firebase.google.com/pricing; docs.streamlit.io (manage your app, status and limitations), discuss.streamlit.io FAQ (1 Mar 2024); huggingface.co/docs/hub (Spaces overview, Spaces GPUs), huggingface.co/pricing; snapdeploy.dev/pricing and snapdeploy.dev/docs/free-tier.
As of late September 2026: Render (750 instance-hours a month, sleeps after 15 minutes), Railway (a $5 trial for 30 days, then a Free plan with $1 of credit a month), Zeabur (free plan with auto-sleep), Back4App containers (256 MB) and SnapDeploy (4 containers, 100 container-hours a month, sleeps after 15 minutes). Koyeb, Fly.io, Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, Oracle and DigitalOcean all require a card or another payment method before anything runs.
No. Heroku ended its free dynos, free Postgres and free Redis on 28 November 2022. The cheapest paid dyno is Eco at $5 a month for 1,000 shared hours, which sleeps after 30 minutes; Basic at $7 never sleeps.
Not for new customers since 7 October 2024. Fly.io offers a trial of 2 machine-hours or 7 days, whichever comes first; after that apps stop until a card or prepaid credits are added. The smallest machine costs about $1.94 a month.
Static hosts: Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel and Firebase Hosting serve files without sleeping. Serverless functions on Cloudflare Workers, Google Cloud Run, AWS Lambda and Azure Container Apps scale to zero, so the first request after idle is slower but nothing has to be woken by hand. Every free tier that runs a long-lived container sleeps or stops: Render and SnapDeploy after 15 minutes, Koyeb after an hour, Back4App containers after their per-deploy window.
Partly. New accounts get a one-time $5 credit valid for 30 days; after that the Free plan, reinstated on 27 August 2025, gives $1 of non-rollover credit a month, limited to 1 project, 3 services and 0.5 GB of RAM per service, with no custom domain. The Hobby plan is $5 a month and needs a card.
Yes, since February 2026. The card-free Hobby plan was removed; a valid payment method with a $29 pre-authorisation hold is required, and sign-up defaults to the Pro plan at $29 a month, which includes $10 of compute. The free instance (512 MB, 0.1 vCPU, Frankfurt or Washington) still exists inside that.
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4 containers, 100 hours a month, 10 deploys a day, no credit card. The full rules are on one page.
