ShipFast, Makerkit, Supastarter and Open SaaS: 7 hosts priced for a kit that has no customers yet
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 starts at $5 plus usage, and Vercel, which three of the four kits recommend, needs Pro at $20 once the app takes payments.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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