Yes, Render has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans. The free plan includes free web service: 512 MB RAM and 0.1 CPU, 750 free instance hours per workspace per month, and Spins down after 15 minutes with no inbound traffic; takes about a minute to spin back up on the next request.
About
Render is a cloud platform for builders that helps teams deploy and run applications, APIs, background jobs, databases, cron jobs, and workflows with minimal operational overhead.
It provides managed infrastructure primitives for modern software delivery, including web services, static sites, private services, Postgres databases, key-value storage, autoscaling, preview environments, zero-downtime deploys, and integrated observability.
- Managed hosting for web services, static sites, and private services
- Fully managed Postgres and Redis-compatible key-value storage
- Autoscaling, preview environments, and zero-downtime deploys
- Infrastructure as code, Docker support, and REST API access
- Integrated logs, metrics, and monitoring for deployed services
Free Tier Value
This free tier is genuinely usable, but it is capped: 25 services, 5 GB of bandwidth, 500 build minutes, 5 retained builds, and only 1 workspace/seat. The cheapest paid workspace plan is Pro at $25/month, and the free offering covers a meaningful slice of that experience, so it’s worth about $8/month; a credit card is required to sign up, which adds some friction.
What's included in the free tier
Verified
- Free web service: 512 MB RAM and 0.1 CPU.
- 750 free instance hours per workspace per month.
- Spins down after 15 minutes with no inbound traffic; takes about a minute to spin back up on the next request.
- Single instance only - no autoscaling on the free plan.
- No SSH access, no persistent disk, and no one-off jobs on free web services.
- Blocked from outbound SMTP ports 25, 465, and 587.
See Render pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Pro
- bandwidth
- 25 GB included per month
- custom_domains
- 15 included
- build_minutes
- 1K mins per month
- builds_retained
- 15 builds retained
- environments
- Unlimited
- team_seats
- Unlimited
- Unlimited seats & services
- 25 GB bandwidth included
- Full-stack previews
- Horizontal autoscaling
- Isolated environments
- OIDC authentication
- AWS Private Links
- Workspace audit logs
Scale
- bandwidth
- 1 TB included per month
- custom_domains
- 25 included
- build_minutes
- 5K mins per workspace per mo.
- builds_retained
- 30 builds retained
- environments
- Unlimited
- team_seats
- Unlimited
- Multiple workspaces
- 1 TB bandwidth included
- Extended metrics retention
- Inbound IP rules
- HIPAA-compliant workspaces
- SAML SSO & SCIM
- Advanced RBAC roles
- Organization audit logs
Enterprise
- workspaces
- Unlimited
- team_seats
- Unlimited
- Contractual uptime SLAs
- Technical account manager
- Support Slack channel
- Support response SLAs
Pricing extracted from Render's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is Render free forever?
Yes. Render has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans, though the allowance typically resets each month.
What happens when you exceed Render's free tier?
You move to a paid plan. Render's cheapest paid plan is Pro at $25 / month.
What is Render's free tier worth?
Render's free tier is worth about $8.00 per month. That maps to an FTV score of 48/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.
