This repository offers a collection of services with great free tiers for developers on a budget. Because not everyone has 20$ per month to spend on app or database hosting for every single side-project.
Nowadays, a lot of services are offering really good free tier more than enough for testing small apps and even put them in production. They are just waiting to be used by you.
There are not much rules for a service to be in this list but free tiers too limited should be excluded. If the limitation is not critical it should be stated in the Limitations section of each service.
Feel free to contribute to existing services or add new ones. Please follow the guidelines when submitting, you can find them in CONTRIBUTING.md.
Thanks to the contributors: RationalCoding, omajid
- Static app hosting
- App hosting
- Database hosting
- Code collaboration tools
- Continuous integration/delivery
- User authentication
- Push notifications
- Emailing
- Mobile analytics
- Content Delivery Networks
- Misc
- Free tier: 1Gb storage, 10Gb/month transfer, custom domain and SSL
- Pros: includes CDN, auto provisioned SSL, deployment versioning, custom domain, URL rewriting (useful for HTML5 history API), possibility to define headers
- Free tier: 1Gb storage, 100Gb bandwidth or 100K requests/month, 10 builds per hour
- Pros: deploy by pushing on a repository branch (
gh-pages), provide automatic page generator, support HTTPS (on github.io), supports custom domains - Limitations: no HTTPS for custom domains
- Free tier: Completely free for cloud hosted, self hosted version of Gitlab available
- Pros: Use any static website generator, Connect your custom domain(s) and TLS certificates, Shared / Self-hosted CI runners
- Limitations: Shared CI can be delayed some time
- Free tier: Unlimited sites, custom domain and SSL
- Pros: offers continuous deployment, custom redirect rules, git repositories integration, webhooks and notifications (for integration with third parties services)
- Free tier: unlimited deployments, custom domain and basic SSL
- Pros: deploy from CLI, custom 404 pages
- Limitations: no custom redirects or http->https redirection in free tier
- Free tier: 28 instance hours/day, 1Gb outgoing traffic/day, 1Gb incoming traffic/day
- Pros: managed, automatic scaling, plays well with other Google Cloud features (load balancing, datastores...), multiple languages supported
- Limitations: free tier only applies to standard environment which supports Python, Java, Php and Go. Flexible environment with Node.js and Ruby is not in the free tier.
- Free tier: one "dyno" (512Mb memory), custom domains
- Pros: supports multiple languages (Node.js, Ruby, Java, PHP, Python, Go, Scala or Clojure)
- Limitations: instance will sleep after 30 mins of inactivity
- Free tier: instantly deployed Node.js app with collaboration tool
- Pros: based on Node.js, online editor with real time collaboration, live redeploy, great for prototyping and collaboration
- Limitations: no custom domain, memory limited to 64Mb
- Free tier: 512Mb/month
- Pros: can deploy multiple smaller instance for free for a total of 512Mb (4x128Mb, 2x256Mb...), supports multiple languages (Java, JS, Go, Php, Python Ruby), supports containers
- Free tier: 3 small gears (1 CPU, 512Mb memory and 1Gb storage)
- Pros: no time limitation, gears can be used to deploy apps in a lot of languages and/or databases, many deployment templates are provided
- Limitations: deployment requires installation of OpenShift app
- Free tier: 1Gb storage, 1Gb bandwidth/month, 20 deploys/month, free backups
- Pros: auto scaling, multi cloud, free backups, served over HTTP/2, use Node.js last version, can also host static websites
- Limitations: maximum of 1Mb per file, no custom domain, source code is always public
- Free tier: 1Gb storage, 10Gb/month transfer, 100 simultaneous connections
- Pros: really fast can be used for real time pub/sub, libraries for multiple platforms, designed to be used directly from frontend (with security rules), integrates with Firebase Authentication
- Limitations: no backups, limited queries, complicated security rules (read the manual!)
- Free tier: 1Gb storage/day, 50K reads/day, 20K writes/day, 20K deletes/day
- Pros: dashboard, clients available in multiple languages, fully managed (sharding and replication), ACID transactions
- Limitations: complex requests needs specific indexes (read the manual)
- Free tier: 10K rows/month
- Pros: dashboard, secured
- Limitations: SLA with maximum of 4 hours of downtime/month
- Free tier: 25Mb ram, 20 connections
- Pros: dashboard, secured, analytics, access via Heroku CLI
- Limitations: SLA with maximum of 4 hours of downtime/month
- Free tier: 500Mb storage, daily backup,
- Pros: managed on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, data browser, monitoring
- Free tier: 30Mb, 30 connections
- Pros: managed, possibility to choose cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCE, IBM Softlayer) and availability zones
- Free tier: unlimited public and private repositories for 5 users, 1Gb storage/repository, 1Gb file storage, 50 minutes build time/month
- Pros: provide pull requests, issue tracking, code snippets and wiki, has a desktop app
- Free tier: unlimited public repositories, collaborators and organizations
- Pros: provide issue tracking, code snippets (Gist), code reviews, wiki, organizations/team management, 3rd party integration and hooks, has a desktop app
- Limitations: no private repository in the free version
- Free tier: unlimited public/private projects, unlimited private collaborators, unlimited global storage, 10Gb storage/project
- Pros: provide issue tracking, code snippets, wiki and webhooks, can be also self hosted by downloading GitLab Community Edition, provide also free continuous integration services for GitLab.com users
- Free tier: unlimited repos and users, 1 concurrent build, 1500 build minutes/month
- Pros: supports containers (Docker), integrates with many tools (GitHub, Bitbucket, Code Climate, Slack, Jira, etc)
- Free tier: 5 projects, 1 concurrent build, 1 parallel test pipeline, 100 builds/month
- Pros: easy to set up, supports many hosting providers (AWS, Heroku...)
- Limitations: no Docker support in free tier
- Free tier: 20 builds configurations, 3 build agents, access to all features
- Pros: Integrates with cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure and VMware vSphere) and VCS providers (GitHub, Bitbucket), supports Docker
- Free tier: unlimited projects and parallel testing for open source projects
- Pros: great language and hosting provider support, integrates with many tools (GitHub, Bitbucket, Code Climate, Slack, Jira, etc)
- Limitations: free tier is limited to open source projects
- Free tier: unlimited logins for 7000 active users/month, authentication with email/password and up to 2 social providers
- Pros: lots of providers, great documentation, support passwordless authentication, UI provided, compatible with iOS Touch ID, offers welcome emails and tasks triggers
- Limitations: active users are users who logged in the last 30 days
- Free tier: always free, unlimited users
- Pros: offers multiple login providers for free (anonymous, email, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Github), provide welcome emails triggers, integrates well with Firebase database security rules, libraries for multiple platform
- Limitations: no UI provided
- Free tier: always free, unlimited users
- Pros: offers multiple login providers (email, custom with in-app browser, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Github, Instagram, LinkedIn), provide forms
- Free tier: unlimited notifications
- Pros: supports Android and iOS native applications, users segmentation, message scheduling, integrates with Firebase analytics
- Limitations: no javascript library
- Free tier: 10K notifications/month
- Pros: provide dashboard to send push to segments, supports scheduling, designed to be sent from Ionic apps
- Free tier: 10000 emails/month
- Pros: great API, scheduling, SMTP or REST, logs and analytics
- Free tier: 100 millions basic sessions and custom events per month
- Pros: provide dashboard with various metrics (sessions, active users, revenues per user, retention, etc), data can be exported in CSV format, events can be sent through SDKs or REST API, provide iOS, Android and javascript SDKs, events are send in batch and cached until the device is online
- Limitations: export to S3 or RedShift is subject to these services respective pricings
- Free tier: unlimited reporting of 500 events each with max. 25 attributes
- Pros: provide dashboard with various metrics (sessions, active users, revenues per user, retention, etc), demographic segmentation linked to other services (Push notifications), can be exported to BigQuery
- Limitations: only available for native Android and iOS (no javascript version)
- Free tier: unlimited projects, 20 millions data points/month/project, 1 custom event/project, 60 days data history
- Pros: Ideal for mobile applications or "events" oriented websites
- Limitations: limited to 3 team members, funnels and segmentation limited to 2 filters
- Free tier: unlimited websites, free global CDN, free DNS management, shared SSL certificate, 3 page rules/website, basic DDoS protection
- Pros: very fast and reliable free CDN, fast DNS propagation, supports CNAME flattening, compatible with HTTP/2, SPDY, WebSockets and IPv6, offers shared SSL (between User and Cloudflare servers), a lot of services are provided (page rules, script injection, image optimization, statistics, etc)
- Free tier: 75000 total images or videos and 7500 monthly transformations, 2Gb storage, 5Gb bandwidth/month
- Pros: free tiers includes images and videos manipulations (resizing, effects, overlays, optimization), backup and revisions, supports PDF, sprites, animated GIFs, etc. Provide SDK in multiplae languages
- Limitations: free tier does not offer custom domain
- Free tier: provide SSL certificates for free
- Pros: free?
- Limitations: certificates are valid for 90 days so automation is stronly recommended, no wildcard certificates