Free REST API Hosting
8 free plans scored on five things a small API needs, from no card to no minute-long wake-up
If you want to host a small Express or FastAPI app for free, with no card and no surprise bill, Light Cloud's Free plan is the only one of the eight below that passes every check: it runs the app as it is, wakes in a few seconds and never bills you. It does that up to about 4,800 requests a day. Cloudflare Workers comes second and gives you far more room, 100,000 requests a day, but only for code written for its runtime. Vercel, Render, Google Cloud Run, Netlify, AWS Lambda and Railway are all free in some form, each with a catch the table names.
Disclosure: I make Light Cloud. The checks are written down below, so you can score the eight yourself.
How we ranked
"Free API hosting" means different things on different pricing pages, so I fixed the API first. It's an Express or FastAPI app serving 3,000 requests a day, each taking 0.2 seconds, which is the "steady" API on Light Cloud's own pricing page. No database for now; that comes at the end.
Each free plan then got a point for each of five checks:
- it costs $0 for that API;
- the vendor's current pages say no card is needed to sign up;
- the app runs as it is, without being rewritten into a function format;
- nothing documented makes the first request after a quiet spell wait about a minute, or fail;
- the free plan has no end date and can't put a charge on a card.
Ties go to the plan whose vendor restricts less what you may run on it, such as production or commercial use, and then to the faster first request. Fly.io, Heroku, Koyeb and DigitalOcean aren't scored: Fly has no free tier for new accounts, Heroku dropped its free dynos in 2022, Koyeb has asked new users to choose a paid plan since February 2026, and DigitalOcean's free tier covers static sites only. Everything was checked on 2026-10-13.
The ranking
1. Light Cloud
Best for: a small API that should stay free, need no card and never send a bill.
Five points. The Free plan includes $1 of usage a month, 3 server apps and no card (pricing). Our pricing page works out this exact API: 3,000 requests a day at 0.2 s is 5 instance-hours a month at $0.12, plus two deploys, $0.64 in all. You push the repository and it runs; there are Express and FastAPI walkthroughs, and the same works to deploy Express, FastAPI, Go and Spring Boot APIs without a Dockerfile, with deploys on every git push.
Free never bills. If the $1 runs out, the API pauses until next month and nothing reaches your card, because there isn't one. On the same formula the $1 lasts up to about 4,800 requests a day; past that, Lite is $5 a month with $5 of usage. A container that has scaled to zero answers its first request in 3.1 to 3.7 seconds, then fast.
The limits, plainly: Free apps live on a light-cloud.io address, with no custom domain, and Free has no database at all. Your own domain and Postgres start on Lite, which is also where you get your own domain with free SSL. There's no cron and no private network between services.
2. Cloudflare Workers
Best for: APIs written for the Workers runtime that need far more free requests than anyone else gives.
Four points. Workers Free allows 100,000 requests a day, reset at midnight UTC (limits), and Cloudflare's plans page says no credit card is required. Go over and requests fail with Error 1027; nothing is billed. Nobody else here comes close on volume: that's 33 times the reference API.
The point it loses is the runtime. A Worker isn't a Node server or a container; you write for Cloudflare's runtime in JavaScript, TypeScript, Python or Rust (languages), and each invocation gets 10 ms of CPU on Free. Cloudflare's docs include a FastAPI guide for Python Workers, so a small FastAPI app may port with little work. An Express app built around a long-running server needs more.
3. Vercel
Best for: personal projects whose API lives next to a Vercel frontend.
Four points. Hobby includes 1 million function invocations and 4 hours of active CPU a month and can't buy more, so it can't bill you; go over and the feature pauses (Hobby). A Docker image can run as a function on every plan, in beta, so the app needn't change much.
The catch is the use, not the money. Vercel's fair use guidelines limit Hobby to non-commercial personal use, and a paid developer or taking payments counts as commercial. I also couldn't find a current Vercel page that says whether Hobby needs a card, so that point isn't given.
4. Render
Best for: running an unchanged app for free when a slow first request is fine.
Four points. A free web service runs any Docker or native app as it is, no card is needed, and a workspace gets 750 free instance hours a month, enough for one service around the clock (free tier). Without a card on file, going over the free bandwidth suspends free services instead of billing.
It loses the wake-up point. A free web service spins down after 15 minutes without traffic, and Render says waking takes about one minute. That's fine for a portfolio demo and painful for a mobile app's login call. Render also says plainly that free instances are not for production.
5. Google Cloud Run
Best for: the biggest free container allowance, if a billing account is fine.
Three points. The free tier covers 2 million requests and 180,000 vCPU-seconds a month (pricing), and the reference API uses 90,000 requests and about 18,000 vCPU-seconds. It runs your container unchanged and scales to zero.
But the free tier needs a Google Cloud billing account, and usage beyond it is billed at standard rates, not paused. Spend caps that pause Cloud Run at a budget became generally available on 2026-10-12, which helps. You'll also wire up a custom domain yourself.
6. Netlify
Best for: small function-based APIs next to a Netlify site.
Three points. The Free plan has 300 credits a month with a hard limit and is never billed (plans). By its rates the reference API uses about 18 credits for requests and 50 for function compute at the default 1 GB, around 70, plus 15 per production deploy. It also includes Netlify Database, a Postgres that sleeps after 5 idle minutes, which matters for an API.
Two points go missing: the API becomes Netlify Functions rather than your Express server, and the current pricing docs don't say whether a card is needed. When credits run out, every project on the team pauses, the site included.
7. AWS Lambda
Best for: teams heading for AWS anyway.
Three points. Lambda's free tier is one million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds a month (pricing); the reference API at 512 MB uses about 9,000. A function URL gives it an HTTPS endpoint, and most new customers sign up without a payment method.
The app needs adapting: a container image, for example, must include Lambda's runtime interface client. And AWS's Free plan closes the account after six months or when its credits run out, unless you move to the Paid plan, which bills usage beyond the free limits.
8. Railway
Best for: trying an API on the platform you'll pay $5 for later.
Two points. After a 30-day trial, the Free plan gives $1 of credit a month, needs no card and runs your app as it is (free plan). But Railway bills RAM at $10 per GB a month for what your process holds, so an API holding 100 MB around the clock uses the whole dollar before any CPU. Turn on sleep to save it and Railway warns the first request may return a 502. Railway's docs don't say what happens when the free credit runs out, so the last point isn't given either.
Where the others beat us
On volume, Cloudflare Workers wins without contest: 100,000 free requests a day against our roughly 4,800. If your API is JavaScript or Python and you're happy to write it for Workers, that's the better free home. Need a free database too? We have none on Free; Netlify includes one, and a free Neon or Supabase database works next to any row here. A custom domain on a free API is something we only offer from Lite. And if your API is part of a bigger AWS or Google Cloud setup, Lambda and Cloud Run sit closer to everything else you run.
What we do differently is the shape of the promise. No card, an unchanged Express or FastAPI app, a first request in seconds rather than a minute, and a plan that pauses instead of billing. If that's the free REST API hosting you were looking for, it's free hosting with no credit card up to the point where your API has real users, and then $5.
How many requests a day does your API actually get?
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