Free Hosting for Side Projects in 2026: 9 Providers Compared

For a static site or a frontend that may earn money, Cloudflare and GitHub Pages are the safest free picks: Cloudflare Workers Free allows 100,000 requests a day, and GitHub Pages gives 100 GB of bandwidth a month as a soft limit. Vercel Hobby has the most generous allowances for a Next.js app, but its terms limit Hobby to personal or non-commercial use. For a backend that must stay up, no host here is free and always-on: Render's free web service sleeps after 15 minutes idle, and Fly.io no longer has a free tier.

Below are nine providers, checked against each provider's own pricing page, docs or terms on 13 November 2026. Where a page does not publish a number, the entry says so.

What to compare

• Bandwidth and requests. What you can serve before the host pauses or bills you.
• Build limits. Minutes, builds per month or deploys per day.
• Sleep and cold starts. Whether a backend wakes slowly after idle.
• Commercial use. Some free plans forbid it in their terms. Read this before you put ads or a paid product on a free tier.
• Hard cap or overage. Whether the project stops at the limit or the host charges your card.

Side by side

Host	Best for	Free allowance	Sleeps?	Commercial use
Vercel Hobby	Next.js, frontends	100 GB transfer, 1M function invocations, 100 deploys/day	No	Personal or non-commercial only
Netlify Free	Static sites, small APIs	300 credits/month, hard limit	No, but projects pause at 0 credits	Not stated on the pages checked
Cloudflare Workers / Pages	Static + edge code	100k requests/day; static assets unlimited	No	Not stated on the pages checked
GitHub Pages	Static sites, docs	100 GB/month soft, 1 GB site	No	See GitHub's terms
Render Free	Demo web services	750 instance hours/month	Yes, after 15 min	"Do not use them for production applications"
Railway Free	Short trials	$5 once, then $1/month	Not stated	Not stated on the pages checked
Koyeb Free	One small service	1 service, 512 MB, 0.1 vCPU	Not confirmed	Not stated on the pages checked
Deno Deploy Free	Avoid for new projects	1M requests, 20 GiB egress	No	Not stated

Fly.io is not in the table because it has no free tier.

Providers

Vercel Hobby

Vercel's Hobby plan includes 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer, 1,000,000 function invocations, 4 hours of active CPU and 1,000,000 CDN requests a month, with a 5-minute maximum function duration and 100 deployments a day. If you exceed a limit, the docs say you usually wait 30 days before you can use that feature again. The catch is in the terms: "You shall only use the Services under a Hobby plan for your personal or non-commercial use."

• Good for: hobby projects, portfolios, prototypes, previews.
• Not for: anything that earns money; the next step is Pro at $20 per developer seat per month.

Netlify Free

Netlify's Free plan is a credit pool: 300 credits a month, with a hard limit and no way to buy more. A production deploy costs 15 credits, 1 GB of bandwidth costs 20, and 10,000 web requests cost 2; deploy previews and branch deploys are not metered. When credits run out, all web projects are paused and visitors see a "Site not available" page. By the rate table, 300 credits is about 15 GB of bandwidth if you spend them on nothing else.

• Good for: low-traffic static sites and forms.
• Not for: anything that could go viral; a traffic spike takes the site offline.

Cloudflare Workers and Pages

Workers Free gives 100,000 requests a day, 10 ms of CPU time per request and 50 subrequests per invocation. Pages adds 500 builds a month and up to 20,000 files per site, and its pricing page says requests to static assets "are free and unlimited" on free and paid plans. Pages Functions draw on the same 100,000-a-day Workers allowance. Workers Builds on the free plan has 3,000 build minutes a month.

• Good for: static sites with traffic spikes, and edge APIs.
• Not for: long CPU-bound work; 10 ms of CPU per request is tight for heavy rendering.

GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages allows published sites up to 1 GB, a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB a month and a soft limit of 10 builds an hour (not applied to custom GitHub Actions workflows). It serves static files only, so there is no server code.

• Good for: docs, portfolios, project sites, and status pages such as Upptime.
• Not for: server-side rendering or anything needing a backend.

Render Free

Render's free web services spin down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic and take about a minute to wake. Each workspace gets 750 free instance hours a month. Free services have no persistent disk and may be restarted at any time, and the docs say: "Do not use them for production applications." Free Postgres expires 30 days after creation, with a 14-day grace period before deletion.

• Good for: demos, webhook receivers you can wait for, backend previews.
• Not for: production, or a database you want to keep past 30 days.

Railway

Railway's plans page lists a one-time $5 Trial grant and a Free plan with $1 of credit a month. The trial page says it lasts up to 30 days, and without GitHub verification outbound network access is restricted. Trial volumes are deleted 30 days after credits expire. Free-plan services are limited to 1 replica, 0.5 GB RAM and 1 vCPU.

• Good for: trying a full-stack app with a database for a month.
• Not for: a project that must stay up on $1 a month.

Koyeb

Koyeb's pricing FAQ says each organization gets one free web service (Frankfurt or Washington, D.C., 512 MB RAM, 0.1 vCPU, 2 GB SSD) and one free Postgres database with 5 hours of active time and 1 GB of storage. A credit card is required "to prevent fraud and abuse." The page does not confirm whether the free instance scales to zero.

• Good for: one small always-on-style service if you are happy to add a card.
• Not for: anything needing more than 512 MB of RAM.

Fly.io

Fly.io's pricing page says new organizations have no free tier or monthly free allowance. New accounts get $1 of trial credit that lasts 7 days or until used, and a card is needed to continue after the trial. It is a good host to pay for, not one to run free.

Deno Deploy

Deno Deploy's pricing page lists a free plan with 1M requests, 20 GiB of egress and 10 apps, but carries a notice that the service will be sunset in April 2027. Deno's announcement of 9 October 2026 says Deploy "will continue operating for six months before shutting down", with migration help for paying customers moving to Cloudflare Workers. Do not start a new project here.

How to choose

• Static site or blog that may earn money: Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages. Check the current terms for your case.
• Next.js app that stays non-commercial: Vercel Hobby. Move to a paid plan before monetizing.
• Low-traffic site with forms: Netlify Free, accepting that the site pauses when the credits run out.
• A backend demo: Render Free, knowing the first request after idle takes about a minute.
• A backend you want to keep running: budget a few dollars a month, or self-host with Coolify (see the Coolify alternatives).
• Frontend framework: Astro builds static output that every host above accepts.
• Need a database: PocketBase runs as a single binary on a small server, since the free databases above expire or are small.

FAQ

Can I use Vercel Hobby for a commercial project?

No. Vercel's terms say a Hobby plan is only for personal or non-commercial use. Move to Pro before the site earns money.

Which free host does not sleep?

Static hosts such as Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages and Netlify do not sleep, because they serve files from a CDN. Render's free web services do sleep, after 15 minutes without traffic.

Is there a free host with a database?

Render's Postgres is free for 30 days, and Koyeb's free Postgres has 5 hours of active time and 1 GB. Neither is a permanent database.

How current are these limits?

All figures were checked on 13 November 2026 on each provider's own page. Free tiers change often; confirm before you build on a number.

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Before you launch, see where to launch your side project and set up free uptime monitoring. One-time credits for cloud and AI are on the free tiers hub, and more tools are in the Devtools directory.