The Best Free Cloud Hosting in 2026 (12 Compared)

TL;DR: For a small full app that needs a real backend, Koyeb and Render both give you a free web service with no expiration - Koyeb at 512 MB RAM / 0.1 vCPU, Render at the same spec plus 750 free instance hours a month. For a static site, GitHub Pages has no usage ceiling at all, and Cloudflare Pages adds unlimited bandwidth with 500 builds a month. For serverless functions, Cloudflare Workers gives 100,000 requests a day at the edge, and Vercel bundles a frontend host with 1M function invocations a month. Full comparison and gotchas below.

What’s in this list, and what isn’t

This list covers hosting with a sign-up-and-go free tier: create an account, deploy something, and keep it running for as long as you want, no countdown to an expiry date. That rule disqualifies a few products that otherwise look like they belong here:

Railway, Clever Cloud, and Kinsta all give new accounts a block of free usage credit, not a sustained free tier. Once the credit runs out, the app stops unless you add a card. That’s a trial, not a free tier, so none of the three are in the table.
Coolify and ServerAvatar are free, but they’re self-hosted software you install on your own server - not a hosting platform. You still need to pay for the machine they run on. They get a mention below, not a table row.
Render’s own free Postgres database expires 30 days after creation, same as it does for the database roundup on this site. Render’s web service free tier has no such expiry and is in the table; its database isn’t.

Everything below is a real, ongoing, no-expiration-date free tier, checked against each vendor’s own pricing or docs page as of August 2026.

The comparison

Product	Type	Free compute	Free bandwidth / requests	Credit card?	Gotcha
Koyeb	App platform	512 MB RAM, 0.1 vCPU (1 web service)	100 GB outbound/mo	Yes	Free region is Frankfurt or Washington, D.C. only
Render	App platform	512 MB RAM, 0.1 vCPU, 750 instance-hours/mo	Not published per-service	No	Spins down after 15 min idle; ~1 min to wake back up
Vercel	App platform	4 CPU-hours/mo (Fluid compute)	100 GB Fast Data Transfer/mo, 1M Edge Requests/mo	No	Hobby plan is personal, non-commercial use only
Netlify	App platform	300 credits/mo (shared budget)	Included in the credit pool	No	One credit pool covers build, function, and bandwidth usage together
Cloudflare Pages	Static site host	1 concurrent build	Unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/mo	No	100 custom domains per project, 20,000 files per site
Cloudflare Workers	Serverless edge	10 ms CPU time/invocation	100,000 requests/day	No	Daily cap resets at midnight UTC, not on a rolling basis
Deno Deploy	Serverless edge	10 CPU-hours/mo, 150 GiB-hours memory/mo	1M requests/mo, 20 GiB egress/mo	No	Up to 10 active apps per organization
GitHub Pages	Static site host	N/A (static only)	No published cap	No	One site per account/org, unlimited project sites
Northflank	App platform	2 free services, always-on	Not published	No	Also includes 1 free database and 2 free cron jobs
Leapcell	Serverless / app platform	3 vCPU, 4 GB RAM per project (20 projects)	2 GB data transfer/mo	No	100,000 serverless invocations/mo
PythonAnywhere	App platform	100 CPU-seconds/day	Low bandwidth, not numerically published	No	No always-on tasks, no scheduled tasks, no SSH
Azure App Service	App platform	60 shared CPU-minutes/day, 1 GB RAM	1 GB storage	Yes (Azure account)	Explicitly not supported for production workloads

App platforms: run a real backend

Koyeb and Render are the closest match to “deploy a container or a Git repo and get a URL back.” Both give one free web service at 512 MB RAM and 0.1 vCPU - identical specs, different tradeoffs. Koyeb’s free service runs continuously and never spins down. It’s pinned to a Frankfurt or Washington, D.C. region, though, and needs a card on signup. Render’s free service needs no card, but it sleeps after 15 minutes with no traffic. Waking it back up takes about a minute - fine for a side project, rough for anything a user hits cold. Render also caps you at 750 instance-hours a month across the workspace, enough for one always-on-during-the-day service but not several.

Vercel and Netlify both started as static hosts and now bundle serverless functions into the free plan. Vercel’s Hobby plan is explicit about scope: personal, non-commercial projects only. In exchange, you get 100 GB of data transfer and 1M edge requests a month. Netlify moved to a single “credits” model instead: 300 credits a month cover build minutes, function invocations, and bandwidth from one shared pool. That’s simpler to reason about than separate caps, but a build-heavy month leaves less room for traffic.

Northflank and PythonAnywhere sit at opposite ends of the flexibility spectrum. Northflank’s free Sandbox plan gives 2 always-on services plus a free database and 2 cron jobs, with no published sleep behavior - good if you want a small always-on stack without a credit card. PythonAnywhere is narrower by design: one Python web app at a pythonanywhere.com subdomain, 100 CPU-seconds a day, and no scheduled or always-on background tasks - built for learning and small scripts, not a production service.

Azure App Service’s F1 free tier is the outlier here - a big cloud provider’s take on a free web app, at 60 shared CPU-minutes a day and 1 GB of RAM. Microsoft states plainly that the free and shared plans aren’t supported for production workloads. It’s built for trials and learning, not for shipping something real.

Static sites: the free tier that never runs out

If your app is static HTML, or built by a static-site generator, GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages are both always-free with no usage-based ceiling to bump into. GitHub Pages gives one site per account or organization, plus unlimited project sites, with no published bandwidth cap. It’s the simplest option if your code already lives in a GitHub repo. Cloudflare Pages adds unmetered bandwidth on top of a build pipeline: 500 builds a month, one build running at a time, up to 100 custom domains per project. Need more than a single concurrent build, or serverless functions alongside your static files? That’s when it’s worth stepping up to Cloudflare Workers or a full app platform instead.

Serverless compute: pay in requests and CPU time, not instance-hours

Cloudflare Workers and Deno Deploy both run your code at the edge instead of on a single server. Both meter usage in requests and CPU time rather than uptime. Workers’ free plan is generous on request count: 100,000 a day, resetting at midnight UTC. It’s strict on CPU time per call, though - just 10 ms, which rules out anything computationally heavy. Deno Deploy takes the opposite shape: a monthly budget of 1M requests, 10 CPU-hours, and 150 GiB-hours of memory, instead of a daily reset. That smooths out a traffic spike better than a hard daily wall.

Leapcell blurs the line between serverless and app platform. Each of its 20 free projects gets up to 3 vCPUs and 4 GB RAM, well above what Workers or Deno Deploy allocate per invocation. But the 100,000 monthly serverless invocations and 2 GB of data transfer keep the ceiling modest for a production workload.

What about the self-hosted options?

Coolify and ServerAvatar both bill themselves as free, and they are - the software itself costs nothing. What they don’t give you is a place to run it. Both are self-hosted panels you install on your own VPS or server, so you’re still paying for the machine underneath. They’re worth knowing about if you already have a server and want a free deployment layer on top of it. But they don’t answer “where do I host this for free” on their own.

Which one should you actually use?

A small backend with no expiration date: Koyeb if you’re fine with signing up with a card and a fixed region; Render if you’d rather skip the card and can tolerate a cold-start delay after idle time.
A static site with zero ongoing thought: GitHub Pages if the code is already on GitHub; Cloudflare Pages if you want unmetered bandwidth and a build pipeline.
Serverless functions at the edge: Cloudflare Workers for request-heavy, CPU-light workloads; Deno Deploy if you’d rather work against a monthly budget than a daily reset.
A frontend framework with API routes bundled in: Vercel or Netlify - Vercel for the larger bandwidth allowance, Netlify for a single credits pool instead of juggling several caps.
Already deep in one cloud’s ecosystem: Azure App Service, with the caveat that Microsoft doesn’t support the free tier for production traffic.

Whichever you pick, check the product page for the exact numbers before you commit. Free tiers change, and the gotcha that matters most - a sleep timer, a region lock, a daily reset - is rarely the headline number.

FAQ

What’s the best free cloud hosting for a small full-stack app? Koyeb and Render are the closest matches - both give a free web service at 512 MB RAM and 0.1 vCPU with no expiration date. Koyeb needs a card and never sleeps; Render needs no card but spins down after 15 minutes idle.

Is there free static site hosting with no bandwidth limit? GitHub Pages has no published bandwidth cap and is one of the few always-free hosting options with no usage ceiling at all. Cloudflare Pages also offers unmetered bandwidth, capped instead by 500 builds a month.

What counts as a “serverless compute free tier”? Cloudflare Workers and Deno Deploy both run code at the edge and meter it in requests and CPU time rather than server uptime. Workers gives 100,000 requests a day; Deno Deploy gives 1M requests and 10 CPU-hours a month.

Are Railway, Clever Cloud, or Kinsta good free options? Not on a sustained basis. All three hand new accounts a block of free usage credit, not an ongoing free tier. Once the credit runs out, the app needs a paid plan to keep running.

Does free app hosting always require a credit card? No. Render, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy, GitHub Pages, Northflank, Leapcell, and PythonAnywhere all let you start without one. Koyeb and Azure App Service are the two exceptions on this list.