Which 'Free' Hosting Tier Actually Survives 12 Months? Testing the 100-Platform Free-Tier Guide

Heroku killed its free tier in November 2022, and the internet has been compiling replacements ever since. The most ambitious attempt is pavel1337's Awesome Web Hosting 2026, a GitHub guide cataloging more than 150 platforms with free tiers, from Vercel and Netlify to Zeabur, Koyeb, and Coolify. It is a genuinely useful map. But a map is not a survival test.

So here is the survival test. I took the guide's headline picks for full-stack and frontend hosting and asked one question about each: if I deploy a small app today and touch nothing, is it still live and free in 12 months? The verdict table is below, right up front, because that is the answer you came for. The rest of the post explains the three ways "free" dies and prices the fallback for each one.

The 12-month verdict table​

Two rows in that table say "No," three say "with caveats," and the guide itself flags the trend: its own 2026 update notes that Railway and Fly.io now run on trial and usage-based models and are "no longer true 'always free' platforms." The pattern behind those verdicts is worth naming, because it applies to nearly every entry in the 150-platform list.

The three ways "free" dies​

Every free tier that fails the 12-month test fails in one of three ways: it sleeps, it expires, or it bans your use case.

Death by sleep is Render's model. The free web service gets 750 instance-hours a month — enough wall-clock time to run continuously — but it spins down after about 15 minutes without traffic, and waking it takes roughly 30 seconds. For a demo or a staging app, that is fine. For anything a user touches, or anything that polls in the background like a Telegram bot loop, sleep is downtime, and downtime is the thing that pushes you to the $7/month Starter plan that never sleeps. Sleep is honest — Render documents it plainly — but it means "free" and "always-on" are different products.

Death by expiry is the trial-credit trap. Railway gives new accounts a one-time $5 usage credit with no card required, and after it runs out the Hobby plan is $5/month including $5 of usage. Fly.io is stricter: organizations created after October 7, 2024 get no ongoing free allowance at all, just a short trial of 2 VM-hours or 7 days, and then a credit card goes on file. Render's free Postgres belongs in this category too: the compute stays free, but the database expires after its trial window, and the replacement starts around $7/month. A trial is a fine way to evaluate a platform. It is not a hosting strategy, and any list that files trial credits under "free tier" without the distinction is doing you a disservice.

Death by terms of service is the quietest one. Vercel's Hobby plan is free and generous — 100 GB of bandwidth, 100 GB-hours of Fluid Compute, function timeouts up to 300 seconds — but it is restricted to personal, non-commercial use. The day your site takes a payment, runs ads, or sells anything, you are technically in violation, and the compliant move is Pro at $20/month. Nothing breaks; no meter runs out. The free tier simply was never yours for that workload. If you are building anything that might monetize within the year, price Pro from day one.

Frontend free is real — but only for static​

Here is the good news: if your app is static files, free is genuinely free, and the guide's static table holds up. Vercel Hobby and Netlify's free plan both cover small frontend projects at $0, Cloudflare Pages and GitHub Pages are effectively unlimited for static content, and none of them sleep or expire on you.

Watch Netlify's shape, though, because it changed. New accounts are on a credit model — 300 credits a month as a hard cap with no overage — and production deploys (15 credits each), bandwidth (20 credits per GB), and requests all draw from the same pool. A quiet marketing site sips from that pool. An active project deploying ten times a day while serving real traffic can drain it, and when it is gone the site pauses until the month resets. Legacy accounts keep the older 100 GB bandwidth plus 300 build minutes shape. Either way, the boundary line is the same: the day you need a long-running server process, a background worker, or a database, you leave the static category entirely, and none of these allowances follow you.

The database trap​

Compute gets the headlines, but the database is what actually kills most "free forever" stacks. A server that sleeps is annoying; a database that expires or pauses is data loss wearing a trench coat.

The guide's database table tells the story in its "Paused After" column. Supabase's free Postgres (500 MB) pauses after roughly a week of inactivity — recoverable, but your app is down until you notice and resume it. Render's free Postgres does not pause; it expires, and the replacement is a paid plan starting near $7/month. Against those, Neon, Turso, and MongoDB Atlas all offer free tiers the guide marks as never pausing: Neon's 500 MB serverless Postgres, Turso's 9 GB edge SQLite with a billion reads a month, Atlas's 512 MB shared cluster.

The practical upshot: pair a sleeping Render free service with a never-pausing Neon or Turso database and you have a $0 stack that survives 12 months with nothing worse than cold starts. Pair it with the default free database on the same platform and you have a renewal deadline disguised as a free tier. Always read the database row before the compute row.

The self-host row the guide buries​

Scroll past the managed platforms and the guide lists the self-hosted PaaS category, where the math flips. Coolify is free forever under Apache 2.0 when self-hosted — no feature limits, no server caps — and its managed Cloud option is $5/month base covering two servers plus $3 per additional server. Your real cost is the VPS underneath: a commonly cited setup is one ~$5/month Hetzner box running Coolify with headroom for 5 to 10 small apps plus PostgreSQL and Redis.

Run the 12-month numbers against the managed rows. Render Starter at $7/month is $84 a year for one always-on service — and the database is extra, roughly doubling it. Railway Hobby at $5/month plus usage lands at $60-plus for one project's worth of consumption. A $6/month VPS under Coolify is $72 a year for many apps, workers, and databases on one box, with nothing that sleeps, expires, or audits your business model. The trade is operational: you own updates, backups, and the 3 a.m. pages that managed platforms absorb. But on pure 12-month survival per dollar, the self-host row wins by a margin nothing in the managed tables touches — which is presumably why the guide files it under its own heading rather than ranking it against the others.

Pick by workload, not by logo​

If the verdict table is the answer, this is the shortcut. Find your workload, read right:

Two parting observations. First, the guide's most valuable sentence is its warning label, not any table: trial credits are for evaluating, not hosting. Second, the free tier most likely to survive the next 12 months is the one nobody can take away from you — open-source software on a machine you rent. That has been true since before Heroku's free tier died, and the 2026 guide, read carefully, confirms it again.

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.