8 free plans scored on five things a small API needs, from no card to no minute-long wake-up
Free REST API hosting for a small Express or FastAPI app: Light Cloud is the only free plan that passes all five checks (no card, no rewrite, a few seconds to wake, never billed), up to about 4,800 requests a day. Cloudflare Workers is free for 100,000 requests a day if you write for its runtime.
Read post
Use the Light Cloud data explorer to browse PostgreSQL tables, edit and insert rows, add columns, create tables and delete rows, without installing a SQL client.
Julia
Create a PostgreSQL database on Light Cloud in about ten seconds, connect from your laptop with psql, load sample data, and connect from Node.js and Python.
Julia
Only three of eight platforms let you password protect a website for free: Light Cloud with one shared password in four clicks on every plan, Cloudflare Access with emailed sign-in codes for teams under 50, and Render through a do-it-yourself page encryption library. Netlify charges $20 a month, Vercel $20 per project on top of Pro.
Julia
Kubernetes alternatives for small teams, ranked by what you must learn first: Light Cloud, Railway and Render need nothing beyond your code, Fly.io and Coolify one new thing each, Cloud Run and ECS two, and Kamal, Docker Swarm and Nomad three or more.
Julia
Heroku alternatives for an app that lives on review apps: Light Cloud is $5 a month with a preview of every branch included, Railway $5 plus usage, against $16.80 on Heroku for the same app with four review apps. Render is the closest match if you need worker dynos and a scheduler.
Julia
Free hosting for startups, ranked by the first bill: Cloudflare stays free longest for apps that fit in Workers, and Light Cloud's first bill is $5 a month for your own domain, Postgres and an API in any language. Vercel's is $20 per seat, because a startup counts as commercial.
Julia
Supabase alternatives for teams that use it mainly as Postgres: Light Cloud runs the database and the API for $5 a month, Firebase and Prisma land near $10, against $25 for Supabase Pro. If you rely on Supabase auth, realtime and storage, Appwrite, Nhost and Firebase are the closer matches.
Julia
Six ways to host a SaaS MVP for under $10 a month: Fly.io with Neon's free Postgres is the cheapest at about $2.19 across two bills, Light Cloud is the cheapest single bill at $5 with branch previews and a staging password included, and Railway, Cloudflare and DigitalOcean also land at $5.
Julia
Add PostgreSQL to a Node.js app on Light Cloud: create the database, connect with node-postgres using DATABASE_URL with ?sslmode=require&uselibpqcompat=true, deploy, and save a note.
Julia