100 Platforms, One Catch: What Free Hosting Actually Gives You in 2026

The most-starred hosting repo of 2026 is not a hosting company at all. It is a spreadsheet.

iSoumyaDey/Awesome-Web-Hosting-2026 — forked as pavel1337/awesome-web-hosting-2026, aar-labs/awesome-web-hosting-2026, and half a dozen mirrors — catalogs 150+ free-tier platforms across frontend, backend, databases, Docker, and AI. Vercel. Netlify. Cloudflare. AWS. A raw VPS. Every deploy target a junior dev has ever Googled, lined up in one table with a green checkmark that says "Free."

That checkmark is doing a lot of work.

This post opens the spreadsheet, prices what the checkmark actually buys on the five platforms the TODO item names, and runs the number the list never totals for you: what the same hobby stack costs for 12 months free, for month 13, and for two years — compared to the same containers on a flat-rate Hetzner box that never pretended to be free in the first place.

The answer up front: free is 12 months, then the meter starts​

The workload is deliberately ordinary. A hobby stack you would actually ship:

• Frontend — static or SSR site, ~50 GB bandwidth per month
• API — Node.js or Python service, ~200K requests per month
• Database — one Postgres, ~1 GB, small hobby dataset

We price that stack three ways and total 12 and 24 months. Hetzner pricing is the post-June-2026 table (ex-VAT, ex-IPv4, hourly capped to monthly).

Three things to notice before we open any pricing page.

First, "free for 12 months" and "free" are not the same checkmark, but the table renders them identically. AWS's 12-month free tier and Vercel's Hobby tier look equally green on the list; one expires on a date, the other on a usage cap.

Second, the free-tier total is not $0, it is $0 then $X — the 24-month bill is the honest number, and it already overtakes the Hetzner box by mid-year-two for any stack that survives the hobby phase.

Third, the Hetzner line did move in 2026 — CX22 went from €3.79 to €4.49 in April/June repricings, part of Hetzner's generation-named catalog split that lifted CX/CAX ~30% and CCX/CPX 113-175%. Even after that hike, one CX22 still absorbs this entire hobby stack with 20 TB of bandwidth that no free-tier bandwidth cap comes close to. The CAX11 Arm sibling is cheaper still.

The rest of this post is where each number in that table comes from.

What the 150-platform list actually catalogs​

The census started as iSoumyaDey/Awesome-Web-Hosting-2026, subtitled "The Ultimate Guide to Free Cloud Hosting — Compare 100+ Free Tier vs Paid platforms: Vercel, Netlify, Heroku, AWS & VPS. Deploy Node.js, Python, Docker, Databases (SQL/NoSQL) & AI Models for free." Every fork — pavel1337, aar-labs, lukecp5, keksmd — carries the same table with identical content. By mid-2026 the canonical repo tracked over 150 entries across roughly five buckets:

• Frontend / static — Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, Render
• Backend / containers — Railway, Fly.io, Render, Koyeb, Leapcell
• Databases — Supabase, Neon, Turso, PlanetScale, MongoDB Atlas (all with a free tier)
• Raw VPS / IaaS — Hetzner CX, Oracle Always-Free, AWS/GCP free tiers
• AI / serverless — Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Functions, Deno Deploy

Each row lists: free-tier yes/no, fair-use limits (bandwidth, build minutes, storage), paid plan entry price, and "best for." Stars sit in the low thousands and the repo is the top result for the free-tier and free-hosting topics on GitHub.

Why it went viral is obvious — it answers the first question every new dev asks ("where can I host this for free?") with a single searchable page. Why it is dangerous to read as a price comparison is the same reason: a table that puts "Free — unlimited sites" next to "Free — 100 GB bandwidth" next to "Free for 12 months" next to "$0, always" is comparing four different definitions of "free" in one column and letting a checkmark do the conflation.

The honest taxonomy has at least four distinct free-tier shapes, each with a different expiry mode:

A single hobby stack touches at least three of those shapes at once (frontend + backend + database), which is why "I put my app on the free tier" is really three independent expiry bets, not one.

Free tier by free tier: what you actually get in 2026​

Vercel Hobby — $0, 100 GB, one dev, no commerce​

Vercel's pricing page (last updated February 27, 2026) caps Hobby at:

• 100 GB bandwidth (Fast Data Transfer) per month
• 1M edge requests and 1M function invocations per month
• 100 build minutes and 4 CPU-hours of compute per month
• 1 team member — Hobby is non-commercial only; any revenue-generating project requires Pro at $20/seat/month (1 TB bandwidth, 10M edge requests, shared build infrastructure)

The Hobby cap that trips first on a hobby API is usually bandwidth or build minutes, not invocations. Ship a 2 MB hero image and 50 GB goes by at ~25K page views. The paid step past Hobby is not granular — you jump from $0 to $20/seat before usage overage even starts billing, and Pro bandwidth overage beyond 1 TB bills at $0.15/GB.

Netlify Starter (now "Free") — $0, 100 GB, 300 minutes​

Netlify's Starter/Free plan in 2026:

• 100 GB bandwidth per month
• 300 build minutes per month (1 concurrent build)
• 125K serverless function invocations and 1M edge function requests per site/month
• Function execution capped at 10 seconds, bundle at 50 MB

Since late 2025, new accounts run on a credit system (300 credits/month; deploys at 15 credits each, bandwidth at 20 credits/GB past a threshold). Legacy accounts keep the 100 GB/300-minute framing. Either way, the overshoot bill on Pro is $19/user/month for 1 TB bandwidth plus overage. Like Vercel, a second seat is the first real cost for any team.

Heroku — there is no free tier​

Heroku removed its free dyno, free Postgres (hobby-dev), and free Redis tiers on November 28, 2022. There is no hobby free tier to price.

The floor in 2026 is:

• A Hobby dyno at $7/dyno/month (billed ~$0.25/day when running, sleeps are gone on Hobby — it runs 24/7)
• Hobby Postgres or an external free Postgres (Neon/Supabase free tier) to avoid the $9+ Heroku Postgres entry
• Realistic minimum for web + Postgres: $7-$16/month before bandwidth or add-ons

In February 2026 Salesforce moved Heroku to a sustaining-engineering model — bug fixes and security patches only, no new features or enterprise contracts. The platform still runs, but the pricing story is frozen, not competitive.

AWS Free Tier — three clocks, one of them already ticking​

AWS Free Tier in 2026 is actually three overlapping offers, and new accounts since July 15, 2025 are on the credit-based variant:

• 12 Months Free (classic) or credit-based (new) — EC2 t3.micro/t4g.micro, RDS db.t3.micro, 30 GB EBS, 15 GB outbound: free for 12 months from signup (classic) or up to $200 in credits over 6 months (new: $100 on signup + up to $100 earned via onboarding tasks), then full pay-as-you-go. The old 12-month EC2/RDS free tier is gone for new AWS accounts.
• Always Free — Lambda 1M requests/mo, DynamoDB 25 GB, SNS, SES sliver, S3 5 GB: never expires, but sized for a toy, not an API.
• Trials — SageMaker, Bedrock, and friends: short-term credits that vanish after first use.

The hobby trap is the middle row: a t3.micro (2 vCPU, 1 GB) plus db.t3.micro (2 vCPU, 1 GB, 20 GB storage) that felt free for a year bills at roughly $15-$30/month on t3/t4g on-demand once the 12-month or 6-month credit window closes — and the credit-based new-account variant closes it twice as fast. AWS is also explicit: eligibility ends 12 months (or credits) after activation and cannot be extended.

Cloudflare Pages / Workers — the generous edge, but read the storage line​

Cloudflare is the outlier on the list for how generous "free" actually remains:

• Pages — unlimited bandwidth and requests on the free plan
• Workers — 100K requests/day free, then $0.30/million
• R2 — zero egress, ever

The 2026 asterisk is Durable Objects: SQLite-backed DO storage started metering separately in January 2026, and Workflows step/storage metering follows no earlier than August 2026. Stateless Workers remain free-ish; the stateful layer underneath meters on its own schedule. For a hobby app backed by D1/R2/DO, "free" covers the compute; the database next to it already bills per GB.

Free Postgres — Neon, Supabase, Turso​

No 2026 hobby stack ships without a free Postgres, and the census is right to list them. The limits that actually cap a small app:

• Neon Free — 0.5 GB storage, 1 project, limited compute hours (cold after 5 min idle)
• Supabase Free — 500 MB DB, 2 GB bandwidth, pauses after inactivity
• Turso Free — 9 GB storage, 500 databases, 500M rows read/month

Each is genuinely free for the specimen workload (~1 GB, ~200K queries). Each also sleeps: cold start on the next request after idle, exactly the latency tax Render's free tier made famous before it removed heritage spin-down as a paid feature.

Raw VPS — Hetzner CX22 / CAX11 as the flat-rate anchor​

Hetzner is the only row on the list where "free" is not the pitch — flat is.

The April and June 2026 Hetzner repricings raised CX/CAX ~30% (from €3.79 to ~€4.50) and CCX/CPX 113-175%. The hobby-shaped box (CX22/CAX11) is the one that moved the least. Twenty terabytes of bandwidth — not 100 GB — is the included number, so the overage that pauses a Netlify free site is not a concept on this box.

The month-13 cliff: a worked bill​

Put the specimen workload on the green-check stack for a full year, then keep it running.

Months 1-12 — assembled from free tiers:

• Frontend on Vercel Hobby — inside 100 GB, inside invocation caps: $0
• API on a free-tier backend (Cloudflare Workers free or a free-render-style service): $0
• Postgres on Neon Free (0.5-1 GB): $0
• Total: $0/month. The spreadsheet was right.

Month 13 — what actually changes:

One plausible month-13 hobby bill — Vercel Hobby already on Pro because a teammate joined, plus a free Postgres still inside caps, plus an API that outgrew Workers free and now bills at a few dollars:

• Vercel Pro (1 seat): $20
• Workers/Functions overage (~500K extra invocations): $2-$5
• Neon/Supabase still inside free, or upgraded at $0-$5
• Total: ~$22-$30/month — and still capped at 100 GB-1 TB bandwidth before egress overage even starts.

Double that if a second collaborator needs a seat. Triple it if the API and database were on AWS's 12-month free and that window just closed the same month the frontend needed Pro — the expiry events stack.

Sensitivity matters. At 50 GB bandwidth and 200K requests the free tiers hold. At 150 GB (one heavier image set, one post that hits HN for a day) Vercel Hobby is already over cap whether the month is 3 or 13. The calendar expiry is the predictable cliff; the bandwidth cliff is the random one that can land on any month.

The flat-rate counter-proposal: one box, one number, no expiry​

The same specimen workload on a single Hetzner box:

CX22 — 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD, 20 TB traffic, €4.49/month (ex-VAT, ex-IPv4). CAX11 — 2 vCPU Arm, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB, 20 TB, ~€4.15/month — the cheapest x86-or-Arm shape that still fits.

What fits on that box:

• Frontend static/SSR (Nginx or container) + API container + Postgres container, all on one VM at hobby scale
• Or split across a Cluster API fleet — one management cluster + one workload node, declaratively described in HetznerCluster / HetznerMachineTemplate, so the second and third machines are a replica count, not a migration

What the box does not give you for free:

• No auto-scale — you sized the VM, traffic spikes queue or need a second node you add yourself
• No managed Postgres failover — single-node Postgres with volume snapshots is the hobby HA story
• You run the control plane — etcd, kubelet, CAPH controllers, cert-manager, ingress

The honest comparison is not "Hetzner is cheaper than free." It is "Hetzner is €4.49 from day one and €4.49 on day 400, while free is $0 then $20-$35 from the day any one of three independent caps trips."

Stacked over 24 months (the window where "free" proves whether it was free):

The free stack wins months 1-6 outright — you cannot beat $0. It breaks even with Hetzner around month 14-16 depending on how many caps you tripped, and by month 24 it is 2-4x more expensive than the box that charged from day one. Under the newer AWS credit-based free tier the crossover lands around month 8-10, because the $200 credit runs out before the first year does.

The non-price differences are where the trade is actually decided:

• Seat pricing — Vercel/Netlify Pro charge per collaborator; Hetzner charges per vCPU regardless of how many people push to it
• Bandwidth — 100 GB caps vs 20 TB included: a 200 MB deploy artifact or a single viral image erases the gap
• Lock-in shape — free Postgres that sleeps vs Postgres on your own volume that does not; vercel.json routing vs a plain container image

None of this is an argument that free tiers are useless. They are the best prototyping tool ever built — no credit card, no SSH key, one click. It is an argument that a prototyping tool is not a hosting strategy, and a curated list of 100 of them is a census of on-ramps, not of homes.

How to use the 150-platform list without getting trapped​

The list is most useful when read as intended — a directory to pick a starting point from — and with three exit disciplines applied on day one:

1. Bring your own domain on day one. A free platform subdomain (*.vercel.app, *.netlify.app) is a migration tax later. Pointing your own domain via CNAME from the first deploy makes the platform a deployment target, not an identity.

2. Keep Postgres outside the frontend vendor. Pair Vercel/Netlify with an external free Postgres (Neon, Supabase, or your own on Hetzner) whose connection string is an env var, not a platform add-on. When Vercel flips to Pro or Neon cold-starts annoy you, the database moves without the frontend.

3. Ship a container image you can run anywhere. A Dockerfile that builds your app plus a docker-compose.yml that runs it with Postgres is a one-file portability guarantee. Buildpacks are faster to start, but the image is the artifact that moves to a Hetzner box with zero rewrite.

When traffic crosses the point where any free cap trips — or the calendar hits month 13 — the move is then mechanical: point the Cluster API fleet at the same image, apply the Postgres volume, flip DNS. That is the workflow Bex itself is built to own: push a git repo, get a running HTTPS service on machines you already paid for, no seat fee, no per-GB meter on bandwidth you already bought, and no second pricing page to consult when a teammate joins.

Use the free tiers to learn what your app actually needs. Pay for the box once you know.

The census is worth bookmarking: iSoumyaDey/Awesome-Web-Hosting-2026 (canonical) and its forks, including pavel1337/awesome-web-hosting-2026. Note the Hetzner prices quoted above are the post-June-15-2026 catalog (Hetzner Cloud generation-named plans); check hetzner.com/cloud for the live table.

Bex.co is the open-source, AI-native Render alternative — push a git repo, get a running HTTPS service on machines you own. Star the repo on GitHub or deploy your first app today.