A curated list of developer-friendly services with generous free tiers for solo developers, indie hackers, students, hobby projects, prototypes, and small SaaS applications.
The goal of this list is to help you build and run real projects with $0 infrastructure cost for as long as possible.
⚠️ Free doesn't always mean unlimited. Always check the provider's current pricing and fair-use policies before relying on a service for production workloads.
- Databases
- Vector Databases & Embeddings
- Embedded & Analytical Databases
- Backend & App Hosting
- Serverless & Edge
- Object & File Storage
- CDN & DNS
- Monitoring & Uptime
- Logging & Observability
- Error Tracking
- Authentication
- Headless CMS & Content
- Forms & Feedback
- Caching & Redis
- Search
- Analytics
- Queues & Messaging
- Cron Jobs & Scheduling
- CI/CD
- Containers & Registries
- AI / LLM APIs
- AI Web Scraping & Crawling
- Speech, Audio & Voice AI
- Image & Media Processing
- Maps & Geolocation
- Feature Flags
- API Gateways & Reverse Proxies
- Secrets Management & Security
- Browser Automation & Testing
- Documentation & Developer Portals
- Payment Sandboxes & Testing
- Developer Utilities
- Free VPS / Compute
- Mobile Development
- Useful Free APIs
- No-Credit-Card Services
- Open-Source Alternatives
- Example $0 Stacks
Neon is excellent when you simply need PostgreSQL without maintaining a server. Its current Free plan includes 100 projects, 100 CU-hours per project/month and 0.5 GB storage per project.
TiDB Cloud (Serverless) provides a remarkably generous 25 GiB free storage and 50 million Request Units/month with zero credit card required, making it one of the largest free MySQL-compatible database offerings available.
Supabase combines PostgreSQL, authentication, storage and APIs. Its current Free plan includes a 500 MB database, 1 GB file storage and 50,000 MAU, although inactive free projects can be paused.
Qdrant Cloud offers a permanent 1 GB cluster (no credit card) running true native Rust vector search. If you are building with PostgreSQL on Neon or Supabase, pgvector is pre-installed and uses your existing database quota without requiring a separate vector provider.
Lightweight in-process or columnar databases designed for fast local execution, real-time analytics (OLAP), data science, and serverless querying without running heavy database clusters.
DuckDB is the "SQLite of analytics." It runs directly inside your application process (Python, Node.js, Rust, Go, or WASM in the browser), requires zero background daemon, and can query multi-gigabyte Parquet or CSV files directly from S3 or local disk with extreme efficiency.
Tinybird exposes ClickHouse as serverless REST APIs with automated endpoint generation and a permanent free tier that requires no credit card.
Vercel's current Hobby plan is $0 and includes items such as automatic CI/CD, CDN, DDoS mitigation and serverless/edge functionality.
Hugging Face Spaces is an exceptional free resource for backend Python applications, Gradio/Streamlit dashboards, and Dockerized microservices, offering 2 vCPU and 16 GB of RAM on its basic CPU tier with $0 infrastructure cost.
Netlify currently offers a $0 Free plan with 300 monthly credits and includes deployment, previews, functions, database/blob functionality and CDN delivery.
Railway is worth including, but with an important caveat: its current free plan provides $1/month of free usage after the initial $5/30-day trial, rather than unlimited free hosting.
Deno Deploy currently lists 1 million requests/month, 20 GiB monthly egress and 500,000 KV write units/month on its Free plan.
Cloudflare's free ecosystem is particularly useful because DNS/CDN/DDoS protection, Pages, Workers, R2 and Tunnel can be combined into a small application stack.
UptimeRobot currently offers 50 monitors, HTTP/port/ping/keyword/API/UDP/DNS/SSL monitoring and a 5-minute interval on its $0 plan, with no credit card required.
Axiom provides an extraordinary 0.5 TB (500 GB) per month log ingestion allowance on its Free plan with no credit card required, making it unmatched for serverless and container logging.
Resend currently offers 3,000 emails/month, with a 100-email/day limit on its Free plan.
Free AI quotas change particularly often, so verify current limits before building around them.
💡 Pro-Tip: GitHub Models allows developers to test leading commercial LLMs (like GPT-4o and Mistral Large) via standard OpenAI-compatible SDKs using a personal GitHub token at $0 cost. Google AI Studio offers one of the highest hosted free-tier throughput allowances for Gemini models (up to 15 RPM / 1M TPM on Flash tiers).
For a genuinely zero-cost, permanent AI application without external API rate limits, running local models via Ollama or llama.cpp provides complete predictability.
Modern tools and APIs designed specifically for AI agents, LLMs, and RAG pipelines to bypass bot blockers, execute JavaScript, and convert arbitrary web pages into clean Markdown or structured JSON.
Jina Reader provides the easiest extraction workflow on the internet: prepend https://r.jina.ai/ before any web URL to retrieve clean, LLM-ready markdown with navigation bars, advertisements, and cookie banners automatically removed. No registration or API key is required for basic usage.
Firecrawl turns entire websites into clean LLM-ready knowledge with its crawl endpoints, automatically handling JavaScript hydration, pagination, and dynamic client-side rendering.
Production-grade speech recognition (STT), voice generation (TTS), and audio intelligence APIs with generous developer tiers.
Deepgram offers an unprecedented $200 free credit with no credit card required, allowing developers to transcribe hundreds of hours of audio or stream real-time conversational voice agents at zero cost.
ElevenLabs provides the highest quality synthetic human speech with 10,000 free characters every month for prototypes and voice-over automation.
Secure centralized vaults to store API keys and environment variables, keeping .env files out of source control and syncing across cloud deployments.
Doppler eliminates .env file management completely. You can run your local app with doppler run -- npm start to inject secrets at runtime without writing them to disk, and automatically push secrets to Vercel, GitHub Actions, Render, and Docker whenever values change.
Headless browser cloud runners and end-to-end testing infrastructure for web scraping, automated screenshots, and synthetic user journeys.
Turn Markdown, OpenAPI specs, or Git repositories into modern, searchable developer documentation and API references.
Simulate credit card checkouts, subscriptions, webhooks, and invoice generation in staging environments without charging real money or providing payment credentials.
The Stripe CLI (stripe listen --forward-to localhost:3000/api/webhook) forwards live test webhook events directly to your local development server with zero port-forwarding or ngrok setup required.
⚠️ Cloud-provider "Always Free" programs frequently have region, account, capacity and eligibility restrictions. Treat them differently from simple $0 SaaS tiers.
This section is particularly useful for developers who want to build without entering payment information.
Firebase's current pricing explicitly describes its Spark/no-cost plan as requiring no payment method, while services like Deepgram, Doppler, Jina, Zeabur, TiDB Cloud, and Railway provide immediate free-tier access without payment credentials.
When a hosted service's free tier isn't enough, self-hosting can turn many services into effectively unlimited software.
A surprisingly capable solo-developer stack can be assembled from these services:
┌──────────────────────┐
│ Cloudflare │
│ DNS / CDN / WAF │
└──────────┬───────────┘
│
▼
┌──────────────────────┐
│ Vercel │
│ Frontend / API │
└──────────┬───────────┘
│
┌─────────────┼─────────────┐
▼ ▼ ▼
┌────────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌───────────┐
│ Neon │ │ Upstash │ │ Cloudflare│
│ PostgreSQL │ │ Redis │ │ R2 │
└────────────┘ └───────────┘ └───────────┘
│
▼
┌────────────┐
│ Resend │
│ Email │
└────────────┘
┌────────────┐
│ UptimeRobot│
│ Monitoring │
└────────────┘
Cloudflare
│
├── DNS
├── CDN
├── WAF
├── Workers
├── R2
└── Tunnel
│
▼
Render
│
├── API
├── Worker
└── Cron
│
▼
Neon
PostgreSQL
+ Resend (Transactional Email)
+ Sentry (Error Tracking)
+ UptimeRobot (Heartbeat & Uptime)
┌─────────────────────────┐
│ Cloudflare │
│ DNS / CDN / WAF / SSL │
└────────────┬────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────┐
│ Vercel │
│ Next.js Frontend & API │
└──────┬───────────┬──────┘
│ │
┌──────────────┴──────┐ └──────────────┐
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐
│ TiDB / Neon │ │Pinecone/Qdrant│ │ GitHub Models │
│ Relational DB │ │ Vector DB │ │ / Gemini API │
└───────┬───────┘ └───────────────┘ └───────────────┘
│
▼
┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐
│ Resend │ │ Axiom │ │ UptimeRobot │
│ Email / Auth │ │0.5TB Log Ingest│ │Uptime & Alerts│
└───────────────┘ └───────────────┘ └───────────────┘
┌─────────────────────────┐
│ Scheduled Job │
│ GitHub Actions / Cron │
└────────────┬────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────┐
│ Worker / API │
│ Cloudflare Workers / Go │
└──────┬───────────┬──────┘
│ │
┌──────────────┴──────┐ └──────────────┐
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐
│Jina Reader / │ │ LanceDB / │ │ Google Gemini │
│ Firecrawl │ │ Qdrant Cloud │ │ 2.0 Flash / │
│ Web Extraction│ │ Embeddings DB │ │ GitHub Models │
└───────┬───────┘ └───────────────┘ └───────────────┘
│
▼
┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐
│ Doppler │ │ Upstash QStash│ │ Better Stack │
│Secret Inject │ │Task Queue/Dedu│ │ Logs & Uptime │
└───────────────┘ └───────────────┘ └───────────────┘
┌─────────────────────────┐
│ Cloudflare │
│ DNS / CDN / WAF / SSL │
└────────────┬────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────┐
│ Cloudflare Pages │
│ Next.js / SvelteKit / UI│
└──────┬───────────┬──────┘
│ │
┌──────────────┴──────┐ └──────────────┐
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐
│ Neon Postgres │ │Descope/Better-│ │Stripe Sandbox │
│ 0.5GB / 100 CU│ │Auth (Passkeys)│ │& Webhooks CLI │
└───────┬───────┘ └───────────────┘ └───────────────┘
│
▼
┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐
│ Doppler │ │ Resend │ │ Axiom │
│ Secret Sync │ │3k Emails/Month│ │500GB Log Ingest│
└───────────────┘ └───────────────┘ └───────────────┘
A service is particularly interesting for this list when it satisfies several of these:
- ✅ $0 permanent tier
- ✅ No credit card required
- ✅ No forced trial
- ✅ Reasonable monthly quota
- ✅ Suitable for production hobby projects
- ✅ API/SDK available
- ✅ No artificial "demo only" restrictions
- ✅ Multiple projects allowed
- ✅ Doesn't require a sales call
- ✅ Clear published limits
- ✅ Can be combined with other free services
- ✅ Useful to solo developers
Use these labels when contributing:
- 🟢 Free Forever
- 💳 No Credit Card
- 🔥 Generous
- ⚡ Serverless
- 🐘 PostgreSQL
- 🗄️ Database
- 📦 Storage
- 🌐 Hosting
- ⏰ Cron
- 📈 Monitoring
- 🤖 AI
- 🔐 Auth
- 🧑💻 Developer Tool
- 🏠 Self-Hostable
Free-tier information changes frequently.
Before deploying something important, verify:
- Monthly quotas
- Whether the service requires a credit card
- Whether overages are possible
- Whether the service automatically upgrades you
- Idle/sleep behavior
- Data retention
- Geographic restrictions
- Terms of service
- Commercial-use restrictions
- Whether the free tier is permanent or promotional
This repository should prefer official pricing/documentation sources over third-party lists.
Pull requests are welcome.
When adding a service, please include:
- Service name
- Category
- Official website
- Free-tier limits
- Credit-card requirement
- Whether the tier is permanent
- Important restrictions
- Last-verified date
Example:
| [Example](https://example.com) | Database | 1 GB storage, 100K requests/month | ❌ | Free forever |Please do not submit services that only offer a short free trial unless they also have a permanent free tier.
- free-for.dev — Large infrastructure-focused free-tier list
- free-services-dev — Free developer services
- Free Developer Tools — Free developer-friendly tools
- Free Developer Resources — XaaS resources
The established free-for.dev project is a particularly useful reference point: it restricts inclusion to services with a free tier rather than merely a temporary trial and has accumulated contributions from a large developer community.
Build more. Pay less. Ship sooner.
The purpose of this list isn't to find the cheapest paid infrastructure.
It's to discover combinations of genuinely useful free services that allow an individual developer to build surprisingly capable applications without spending money on infrastructure.