Free Hosting Without a Credit Card

What happens when you hit the free limit on 9 platforms, ranked by the worst case

Free hosting without a credit card, ranked by what happens at the limit: Cloudflare's worst case is a Worker that stops until midnight UTC, Light Cloud's is server apps that pause until next month while static sites stay up, and neither can ever bill you. Render deletes free databases after 30 days plus a grace period, and AWS closes the free account after six months.

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Part 8 of 8

tutorialsNovember 4, 2026

Too Many Connections? Count Them and Size Your Pool

Fix 'too many connections for role' on Light Cloud PostgreSQL: check the 10-connection limit, see who holds connections, and size pool max x instances.

Julia

Part 7 of 8

tutorialsNovember 3, 2026

Schema Migrations on Every Deploy: Run Them When Your App Starts

Run database migrations on every Light Cloud deploy: a node-pg-migrate SQL file, npm start running it before the server, and why rollbacks leave the schema alone.

Julia

comparisonsNovember 2, 2026

Vercel Alternatives for Full-Stack Apps

Vercel alternatives for a full-stack app: Light Cloud runs the frontend, a container API and Postgres for $5 a month with a free staging password, Railway comes to about $6 once its usage is counted, while Vercel Pro is $20 a seat and $20 per project for password protection, with Postgres from a second vendor: Vercel and Neon together come to $20 to $40.

Julia

Part 6 of 8

tutorialsNovember 2, 2026

Rotate a Database Password With Only Seconds of Downtime

Rotate a Light Cloud PostgreSQL password safely: choose the new password, update DATABASE_URL first, rotate when the deploy finishes. 7 seconds of errors, not 2 minutes.

Julia

Part 5 of 8

tutorialsNovember 1, 2026

Import Data into Light Cloud: Upload a .sql Dump or Stream It with psql

Import a SQL dump into a Light Cloud PostgreSQL database: upload a .sql or .sql.gz with Import dump, or stream a large dump with psql in one transaction.

Julia

comparisonsOctober 31, 2026

Where to Deploy a SaaS Boilerplate

Where to deploy a SaaS boilerplate such as ShipFast, Makerkit, Supastarter or Open SaaS: Light Cloud runs the Next.js or Node app plus Postgres for $5 a month, Railway comes to about $7 once its usage is counted, and Vercel, which three of the four kits recommend, needs Pro at $20 once the app takes payments, plus a database from a second vendor.

Julia

Part 4 of 8

tutorialsOctober 31, 2026

Back Up a Database: Download a SQL Dump and Restore It

Back up a Light Cloud PostgreSQL database: download a .sql.gz dump from the Backup tab, restore it into a new database with psql, and script it with pg_dump.

Julia

Part 3 of 8

tutorialsOctober 30, 2026

Run SQL in the Browser: Queries, Joins and Quick Fixes on a Live Database

Run SQL on a Light Cloud PostgreSQL database from the browser: read-only queries, joins and totals, then a quick UPDATE with Allow writes and RETURNING.

Julia

comparisonsOctober 29, 2026

Free REST API Hosting

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.

Julia