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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
JuliaJulia
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Cloudflare has the mildest worst case of any free hosting without a credit card: past 100,000 requests a day your Workers stop until midnight UTC, static assets keep serving, and nothing is billed. Light Cloud comes next: when its $1 of free usage runs out, server apps pause until next month, static sites stay up, and a free workspace is never billed. At the other end, Render deletes a free database after 30 days and a grace period, and AWS closes the free account after six months.

We make Light Cloud, the second row. It isn't first, and the next section says exactly why.

How we ranked

"Free" means little until you know what happens at the limit. So every platform here gets the same four questions. Can it bill you? Is your data ever deleted? What keeps serving while you're over? How long until it comes back?

Only plans whose vendor says, on its own pages, that no card is needed are ranked. Everything was checked on 2026-10-13. The order runs from the mildest worst case to the harshest: never billed with something still serving comes first, then never billed with everything stopped, then data that can be deleted, then a free account that ends or turns into a card. Within a group, a shorter outage ranks higher.

That last rule is what puts Cloudflare above us. Its limit resets every day; ours resets every month.

The ranking

Mildest worst case first, no card on filePrices checked 13 Oct 2026
1
Cloudflare
100k/day
JavaScript apps and static sites: the mildest worst case, a Worker that stops until midnight UTC while static assets keep servingPrice: Worker requests, resets daily
When you hit the limitWorkers stop until midnight UTCWhat keeps servingStatic assets, unlimited
2
Light Cloud
$1/month
Container apps in any language with no card: server apps pause, static sites stay up, and a free workspace is never billedPrice: of usage, no card
When you hit the limitServer apps pause until next monthWhat keeps servingStatic sites
3
Firebase
Spark
Mobile and web apps that talk to Firestore from the client and need no server codePrice: daily and monthly quotas
When you hit the limitThat product stops for the monthWhat keeps servingOther Firebase products
4
Neon
100 CU-h
A free Postgres database with no card that keeps your data when the compute runs outPrice: per project a month
When you hit the limitCompute suspended until next monthWhat keeps servingNothing; data is kept
5
Prisma Postgres
200k ops
Trying Postgres and TypeScript hosting with no card, which Prisma says is for evaluation onlyPrice: per month, whole workspace
When you hit the limitDatabase stops reads and writesWhat keeps servingNothing until next month
6
Railway
$1/month
A no-card trial of the platform before choosing the $5 Hobby planPrice: after a $5 trial
When you hit the limitTrial services stop; Free plan not documentedWhat keeps servingNot documented
7
Render
750 hours
Free web services that can sleep, as long as the database is somewhere elsePrice: of free instances a month
When you hit the limitServices suspended; free Postgres deletedWhat keeps servingStatic sites, until bandwidth runs out
8
AWS
$100-200
Six months of trying AWS itself, after which the free account closesPrice: credit, 6 months
When you hit the limitAccount closes at 6 months or $0 creditWhat keeps servingNothing; content kept 90 days
9
Fly.io
2 hours
A quick look at Fly before adding the card every organization needsPrice: or 7 days, trial only
When you hit the limitApps stop; a card is requiredWhat keeps servingNothing
Free plans that the vendor's own pages say need no card, checked 2026-10-13. Each is ranked by what happens when the free allowance runs out: whether you can be billed, whether data is deleted, what keeps serving, and how long the outage lasts. Vercel, Netlify and Supabase are left out because their current pages don't say whether a card is needed.

1. Cloudflare

Best for: JavaScript apps and static sites.

No card is needed (plans). Workers Free allows 100,000 requests a day across the account, and when you pass it, requests fail with Error 1027 until the limit resets at midnight UTC (limits). Nothing is billed. Requests to static assets are free and unlimited, so the static part of a site keeps working while the Worker is over. Custom domains are free too.

The worst case is a few hours of broken API calls, and that is the mildest here. What the free plan won't do: run a container (that needs Workers Paid, a $5 minimum) or give a Worker more than 10 ms of CPU per request. Its database, D1, is SQLite rather than Postgres.

2. Light Cloud

Best for: container apps in any language with no card.

Free is $0 with no card: unlimited static sites, 3 server apps and a preview URL for every branch, with $1 of usage a month (pricing). A typical static site uses about a cent of it, and a quiet API about ten cents, so the $1 goes further than it sounds. When it does run out, server apps and deploys pause until the next month or an upgrade, static sites keep serving, and the workspace is never billed. The pricing page puts it in four words: "Free never bills you. It pauses."

That outage lasts until the next cycle, which can be weeks, and that is why we rank second. Free also has no database and no custom domain, apps live on a light-cloud.io address, and each page carries a small "by Light Cloud" link. Static bandwidth on Free is fair use at 20 GB a month per workspace. What it does run is more than most rows here: an Express, FastAPI or Go API as a container, scaled to zero when idle. Our FastAPI tutorial deploys one on the free plan.

3. Firebase

Best for: apps that talk to Firestore from the client.

The Spark plan needs no payment method. If a project goes over one product's no-cost quota, that product is shut off for the rest of the month and the others keep running, with no bill. Firestore gets 1 GiB of data and 50,000 reads a day; Hosting gets 360 MB of transfer a day.

The catch is what Spark leaves out. Cloud Functions and App Hosting need the paid Blaze plan, and since 2026-02-03 so does Cloud Storage. So there is no server code on the free plan at all.

4. Neon

Best for: a free Postgres database that keeps your data.

Neon's Free plan needs no credit card and gives each project 100 CU-hours of compute a month, enough for its smallest compute to run 400 hours. When the CU-hours or egress run out, the compute is suspended until next month or an upgrade, and Neon says none of the limits delete your data. Hitting the 1 GB storage cap makes writes fail.

It is a database, not a host for your app, although Neon now runs JavaScript functions too. Our free plan has no database at all, so pairing a free Light Cloud API with a free Neon database is a fair setup.

5. Prisma Postgres

Best for: trying Postgres and TypeScript hosting.

The Free plan is free forever with no card: 200,000 operations a month and about 1 GB of storage, shared across the workspace. When the operations run out, the database stops accepting reads and writes until the next month, with a one-time 24-hour grace period. It is never billed.

Prisma's own FAQ calls the Free plan "intended for evaluation only", and it has no automated backups. Every query counts as an operation, even SELECT 1.

6. Railway

Best for: a no-card trial before the $5 Hobby plan.

The trial lasts 30 days with $5 of credit and needs no card; after that the Free plan gives $1 of credit a month, one project and three services, with no custom domain (free trial docs). When trial credits run out, services stop rather than bill.

Two things put Railway this low. The docs don't say what happens when the Free plan's $1 runs out. And they do say that volumes created on a trial are deleted 30 days after the credits expire, so a database you leave there can disappear.

7. Render

Best for: free web services that can sleep, with the database elsewhere.

Render's free tier needs no payment. A workspace gets 750 free instance hours a month; when they run out, Render suspends all free web services until next month (free tier docs). Without a card on file, going over the bandwidth allowance suspends free services too, and with a card it is billed.

The harsh part is the database. A free Render Postgres database expires 30 days after it is created, and after a 14-day grace period Render deletes it, data included. Free web services also spin down after 15 minutes without traffic and take about a minute to wake.

8. AWS

Best for: six months of trying AWS itself.

A payment method isn't required for most new customers. The Free plan gives $100 of credit, plus up to $100 more you can earn, over six months. It doesn't bill you unless you upgrade. But the account closes on its own after six months or when the credit runs out, whichever comes first, and you lose access to your resources; AWS keeps the content for 90 days.

That makes the worst case an ending, not a pause. It's fine for learning AWS. A project you want online next year needs something else.

9. Fly.io

Best for: a quick look before adding a card.

There is no free tier for new organizations. The trial starts without a card and lasts 2 machine-hours or 7 days, whichever comes first, and trial machines stop after 5 minutes of running. After that, apps stop until you add a payment method, and Fly says all organizations need a card on file.

The ones that need a card, and three we couldn't place

DigitalOcean needs a payment method to create anything, even a free static site. Heroku requires a card before you deploy and has had no free tier since 2022. Koyeb's new sign-ups must choose a paid plan, and Google Cloud's free tier needs a billing account that bills anything above it.

Vercel, Netlify and Supabase have free plans with gentle worst cases, but their current pages don't say whether signing up needs a card, so they aren't ranked. For the record: Vercel's Hobby plan cannot buy extra usage and pauses a feature for 30 days at its limit; Netlify pauses every project on the team when its 300 credits run out; Supabase pauses a free project after a week of low activity and lets you restore it for up to a year.

Where the others beat us

Cloudflare's outage resets daily and ours monthly, and Cloudflare's static traffic is unlimited where ours is fair use at 20 GB on Free. If your app is JavaScript, that is the better free plan. Neon, Firebase and Prisma give you a database for free, and we don't: our databases start on Lite at $5 a month. Firebase hands you sign-in and realtime data with no card, which we don't have on any plan.

What we offer that none of them does in one place: a container API in whatever language you write it, unlimited static sites, a preview URL for every branch and a visitor password on any environment, all with no card. The staging tutorial shows the password in five minutes. If you need more than the free plan that never bills you, the next step is $5, and free hosting for startups compares that step across eight platforms. Agents can set the whole thing up too: you can deploy from Claude Code, and the agent creates the account from an email and a device code. This is free hosting without a credit card that we're comfortable recommending even though we came second.

Which free plan has surprised you at its limit?

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