The Best PaaS Free Tiers of 2024

Ten years ago, nearly every code bootcamp, incubator, and tutorial would reference Heroku’s free tier at some point. In November 2022, Heroku removed their free tier. They still have affordable plans, but this post isn’t about that. Now that the free tier has been gone for a year, it is worth reviewing some of the other free tiers currently available.

Fly.io

Fly.io seems to be the new language agnostic hotness. It has a similar feel to Heroku, but some have said it is still experiencing growing pains.

Resources included for free on all plans:

  • Up to 3 shared-cpu-1x 256mb VMs
  • 3GB persistent volume storage (total)
  • 160GB outbound data transfer

Render.com

Render.com stands out as a Heroku alternative with free support for web services, PostgreSQL, Redis, and cron jobs, though each comes with limitations.

Free tier includes:

  • 750 free compute hours each month
  • 512mb RAM
  • free, fully-managed database for 90 days

Vercel

Built by the people behind Next.js, Vercel specializes in front-end deployments and is favored for SPA frameworks like React and Vue. While it isn’t language agnostic, it is popular in the indie hacker community, otherwise it wouldn’t make this list.

The Free plan (Hobby) includes:

  • Support for 35+ frameworks
  • Global Edge Network
  • Starter database (KV, Postgres)

Netlify

Netlify is one of the more popular free static site hosts. They also are behind the popularity of Jamstack apps. For an absolute beginner learning html, css, and a bit of javascript, their drag-n-drop to deploy feature is helpful.

Their free plan includes:

  • 100GB bandwidth
  • 300 build minutes
  • Live site previews

The Big Three

AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform all have rather extensive free tiers, and it is worth being familiar with their tooling, but none of them have a free PaaS product.

Honorable Mention

There are several PaaS mentioned on the Free-for.dev site, among which are Anvil.works and Domcloud.co. A lot of the items on this list are more language or architecture specific, so be sure to bookmark the ones relevant to you.

If you have any recommendations for this list, feel free to join us in Devanooga to share your thoughts.