TL;DR: The 20 recurring free tiers that give away the most usage per month, ranked by estimated monthly dollar value as of May 2026. No credit card program or 12-month signup window required to make this list.
How the ranking works
Every listing gets a dollar estimate for how much its free tier would cost if you paid for the same usage on the vendor’s cheapest paid plan. The full methodology is on the FTV page.
This list excludes:
- Always-free unbounded offerings (jsDelivr, BootstrapCDN, etc.) - those have no dollar ceiling so they don’t rank on a dollar axis. See the always-free list for those.
- 12-month intro tiers (AWS Free Tier, Azure free account) - those are one-off signup offers that expire, not sustained monthly value.
- Free credits ($300 GCP, $1000 Temporal) - those are one-time pools, not recurring monthly allowances.
- Free trials - time-limited by definition.
The list below is sustained free tier offerings only: allowances that reset every month, indefinitely.
The top 20 (May 2026)
| # | Product | Monthly value | Credit card? | The hook |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Amazon Cognito | $150.00 / mo | Required | 10,000 MAUs free forever at the published $0.015/MAU rate |
| 2 | ReadMe | $125.00 / mo | Required | Interactive API docs platform with a real free Starter plan |
| 3 | Activepieces | $50.00 / mo | Required | 10 active automation flows, billed at $5/flow on paid |
| 4 | Statsig | $45.00 / mo | Not required | 2M experiment events/month, no credit card |
| 5 | beehiiv | $43.00 / mo | Not required | 2,500 newsletter subscribers on the Launch plan |
| 6 | Zeet | $39.00 / mo | Required | 3 projects free, 7 team members, 10 cloud accounts linked |
| 7 | Hygraph | $35.00 / mo | Not required | 1,000 entries + 500K API calls on a headless CMS with no CC |
| 8 | Modal | $30.00 / mo | Required | $30 of actual compute credit every month (real dollars, not tokens) |
| 9 | Autohive | $28.00 / mo | Not required | 350,000 AI-agent credits on a no-CC plan |
| 10 | Chromatic | $26.00 / mo | Required | 5,000 visual-regression snapshots/month for Storybook |
| 11 | RevenueCat | $25.00 / mo | Not required | Free up to $2,500 MTR - then 1% fee. Real pay-as-you-grow |
| 12 | SuprSend | $25.00 / mo | Not required | 10,000 multi-channel notifications/month |
| 13 | Storyblok | $25.00 / mo | Not required | Visual headless CMS with 100K API requests on free |
| 14 | Inngest | $25.00 / mo | Not required | 50,000 durable workflow executions/month |
| 15 | Formbricks | $25.00 / mo | Not required | 250 survey responses/month + open source self-host |
| 16 | highlight.io | $25.00 / mo | Required | 500 session replays/month, open source |
| 17 | JetBrains Datalore | $17.50 / mo | Not required | 120 CPU-hours/month for hosted Python notebooks |
| 18 | Auth0 | $17.50 / mo | Required | 25,000 monthly active users on the free plan |
| 19 | Pusher | $16.33 / mo | Required | 200,000 realtime messages per day |
| 20 | Webpushr | $15.00 / mo | Not required | 10,000 push subscribers on the free plan |
What stands out
Amazon Cognito tops the list. 10,000 monthly active users free, forever. Cognito publishes a per-MAU overage rate ($0.015), so the free tier’s cost avoidance is exact: 10,000 × $0.015 = $150/month that a paying customer would owe at the same volume. It loses points for needing a card and living inside the AWS console, but the raw allowance is extraordinary.
ReadMe is the quiet sleeper. $125/mo of value on a free tier is genuinely unusual - the Starter plan includes interactive API explorer, hosted docs, API reference pages, and custom domains. The ceiling is how many API reference pages you can host, which for most small products is comfortably under the free cap.
Half the list doesn’t require a credit card. Statsig, beehiiv, Hygraph, Autohive, RevenueCat, SuprSend, Storyblok, Inngest, Formbricks, JetBrains Datalore, and Webpushr all let you start with just an email. That’s a big deal - nothing kills a hackathon or prototype faster than hunting for a team card.
Modal is the rare “actual dollars” free tier. Most serverless platforms give you compute measured in opaque quotas. Modal gives you $30 of real compute credit every month, refreshed on the first. Spend it on GPU time or CPU - your call.
RevenueCat’s model is the most honest. Free up to $2,500 in monthly tracked revenue, then 1%. Nothing to configure, no seat limits - the free tier scales exactly as far as your business does. If you’re shipping a mobile app today, this is the one to use.
Open source sneaks into the list. Formbricks and highlight.io are open-source products whose hosted free tier is a legitimate self-serve option - and if you ever outgrow it, you can just self-host.
What didn’t make the list (and why)
- Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages - great free tiers, but most of the generous bits (unlimited deploy previews, global CDN) are “unbounded” infrastructure, not a dollar quota. They rank high on the always-free list instead.
- Supabase, Neon, PlanetScale - all solid, but their cheapest paid plans are close enough to free that the free-tier value lands in the $3-10/mo range - great, just not top-20.
- AWS, GCP, Azure free credits - those are one-time ($300 / $200 / $200) so they show up on the free credits list, not here.
- GitHub Free, Figma Free, Linear Free - excellent products, generous allowances, but their paid plans start very cheap so the $/mo upper bound is small.
- Canva Free - genuinely useful visual design tier, but the cheapest paid plan (Pro) is only around $12/month, which puts the free-tier value in single-digit dollars per month. It’s on the directory, just not top-20 on the dollar axis.
The best free tier for your project depends on the workload. Use this list as a shortlist, then dig into the product pages for the actual quotas.
See also
- FTV methodology - how the dollar value is estimated
- Always-free services - the truly unbounded ones
- Free cloud credits - one-time pools for new accounts
- Full directory - all 400+ listings, filterable by category
This list is updated monthly. Prices and quotas reflect vendor pricing pages as of May 4, 2026. Vendors change their offers - always confirm the live plan before committing.