Where to deploy for free in 2026: a decision tree that's actually current
Published 2026-10-08
“Deploy for free” advice has a short shelf life. Heroku died in 2022. Railway’s free tier became a one-time credit in 2023. Fly.io dropped free allowances for new users in 2024. Glitch shut down entirely in 2025. Netlify quietly cut its free bandwidth by ~85% the same year.
Everything below is verified against official pricing pages — each service links to our tracked data page with a “last verified” date. Here’s the decision tree.
Start here
What are you deploying?
│
├── Static site / SPA (HTML, JS, no server code)
│ └── → Cloudflare Pages. Done.
│
├── Server app (API, bot, backend, Docker container)
│ ├── Can it sleep between requests?
│ │ ├── Yes → Render (no card) or Koyeb (card, faster wake)
│ │ └── No (needs 24/7) → Oracle Always Free VM
│ └── Is it JS/TS only? → also consider Deno Deploy
│
├── Scheduled jobs / crons / automation
│ └── → Oracle VM running Docker, or GitHub Actions (public repos)
│
└── Database
└── → See our dedicated Postgres comparison (link below)Static sites: Cloudflare Pages wins, and it’s not close
| Cloudflare Pages | GitHub Pages | Netlify | Vercel | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | Unlimited | 100 GB soft | ~15 GB (credits) | 100 GB |
| Builds | 500/month | 10/hour soft | ~20 deploys/mo | 6,000 min/mo |
| Commercial use | Allowed | Restricted | Allowed | Prohibited on free |
| Card required | No | No | No | No |
The 2025 shake-up matters here: Netlify’s new credit system gives new accounts roughly 15 GB effective bandwidth (the old 100 GB tier is closed), and Vercel’s hobby plan bans commercial use — an ad-supported blog technically violates it. Cloudflare Pages has no bandwidth cap, no commercial restriction, and free custom domains. Unless you’re locked into Next.js-specific features (ISR, image optimization), it’s the default.
(This site runs on Cloudflare Pages. Zero cost, zero problems so far — including surviving our own traffic spikes.)
Server apps: three real options remain
Render — easiest, sleeps hard
Free web services: 512 MB RAM, no card required, but 15-minute idle spin-down with ~50-second cold starts. Fine for demos and webhooks that tolerate latency. The free Postgres is a 30-day trap — don’t build on it.
Koyeb — faster, but watch the signup
One free instance (512 MB, scales to zero after 1 hour — gentler than Render’s 15 minutes). Two catches: card required, and signup pre-selects the $29/month Pro plan — you must manually downgrade to Starter. Also: Frankfurt/Washington only for free instances, and Koyeb just joined Mistral AI, so watch for changes.
Deno Deploy — generous if you’re all-in on JS/TS
1M requests, 20 GiB egress, 10 CPU-hours/month. The CPU-hours model is clever: I/O-bound apps (APIs waiting on databases) barely consume any. Scale-to-zero in ~20-30 seconds means constant cold starts for sporadic traffic, but they’re fast cold starts.
The ones to skip
- Railway: one-time $5 credit, not a free tier — despite what 10,000 tutorials say
- Fly.io: no free allowance for new accounts since late 2024
- Glitch: shut down July 2025
- Zeabur: free plan manages servers you bring; bundled free compute is undocumented
Always-on without sleeping: Oracle, with eyes open
The only genuinely free 24/7 compute is Oracle’s Always Free tier: a 2 OCPU / 12 GB ARM VM (note: half the famous 4/24 figure — we covered the quiet reduction). Card required for identity, idle VMs get reclaimed, and signup rejections are common. But nothing else gives you a real machine, free, forever.
That one VM can run what would otherwise be several PaaS deployments: we run Uptime Kuma (~150 MB) and n8n (~450 MB) classes of workloads comfortably in that footprint.
Databases
Covered in depth in our free Postgres comparison — short version: Supabase (India/Mumbai, 5ms measured), Neon (branching, 1 GB), Aiven (real VM), Prisma Postgres (50 DBs). CockroachDB and Xata killed their free tiers; Render’s expires in 30 days.
The honest caveats
- Every free tier above is interruptible by design — sleep, scale-to-zero, reclaim, or pause. If downtime costs you money, a ~$5/month VPS is the real answer.
- Free tiers die. Seven majors died or were gutted since 2022 (the graveyard). Keep your app portable: Docker, standard databases, exported env vars.
- This page will rot too — except we monitor these pricing pages automatically and update when they change. The “last verified” date on each data page is the freshness guarantee.
Verified 2026-10-08. When one of these tiers changes, subscribers hear first.