Frequently asked

FreeTier.co is a directory of substantial free offerings across cloud, SaaS, and developer tools. Each listing is classified, scored, and updated periodically so you can compare free plans, free trials, free credits, and always-free products without crawling pricing pages yourself.

Everything that gets you something useful without paying up-front. We classify each listing as always free, free tier, intro tier, free trial, or free credit, and you can browse by those types at /directory/types. We exclude listings that are effectively paid - if the vendor's only 'free' is a 'talk to sales' link, it doesn't make the cut.

FTV stands for Free Tier Value. It's our 0-100 score for ranking free offerings against each other. The score combines four things: how durable the free offer is, how much dollar-value you get, whether a credit card is required, and how many of the paid product's features the free tier includes. Every product page shows its FTV score with a short rationale. See /ftv for the full methodology.

80-100 is excellent - unbounded or effectively-unbounded offerings with no friction. 50-79 is strong - real free tiers with meaningful headroom for small-team workloads. Below 50 is limited - short trials, small credits, or tightly-capped tiers where a credit card is usually required. See how FTV is calculated.

The /top page ranks the best free offerings in the directory two ways: by FTV score and by estimated dollar value. Rebuilt every deploy from the current catalogue, so it reflects the latest data.

Listings are re-checked periodically to catch pricing changes. If a vendor drops their free tier, raises caps, or cuts a trial short, the score shifts the next time we look. New listings are added continuously, and every product page carries a 'Verified' date so you know how recent the data is.

It depends on the vendor. Most cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) require a card even for their free tier. Many SaaS products don't - we surface this as part of the FTV breakdown on each product page so you can filter for no-card-required offerings up front.

Most providers charge at their standard pay-as-you-go rates once you exceed free limits. Free credits are depleted; free trials convert to paid subscriptions or lock you out. Read each product's free-tier bullets carefully and set up billing alerts with the vendor to avoid surprises.

It's an estimate, not a guarantee. For products with flat paid plans we benchmark against the cheapest plan that exceeds the free cap. For usage-based products we multiply free quotas by paid rates. The numbers are good for comparison between listings but not for budgeting - always verify with the vendor's own calculator before committing. Full method at /ftv.

It depends on what you're building. Cloudflare has the most generous always-free offerings for edge compute, R2 object storage, D1, and Workers - most with unbounded free quotas. AWS, GCP, and Azure have deeper catalogues but their headline Free Tier is a 12-month intro, not a permanent free plan. For perpetual free compute we recommend starting with Cloudflare Workers, Vercel, or Netlify; for databases, Supabase, Neon, or Cloudflare D1. Our /top page ranks the current leaders by FTV.

Partly. AWS Free Tier bundles three things: a 12-month intro allowance for common services (EC2, RDS, S3), a handful of always-free services (Lambda 1M requests/mo, DynamoDB 25 GB), and short trials for others. You still need a valid credit card on the account, you can still exceed the allowances and get billed, and from July 2025 the programme moved to a credit-based model - see our article on AWS Free Tier Changes for the details.

A free tier is a permanent free plan that resets every month - you can build on it indefinitely within the caps. A free trial is time-limited (typically 7-30 days) and usually unlocks the full paid product; when it ends you either pay or lose access. Intro tiers are a hybrid: AWS and Azure give you a generous 12-month allowance and then drop you to the much smaller always-free allowance. Free credits are a one-time signup pool, not a recurring allowance.

Supabase, Neon, and MongoDB all give meaningful free Postgres, SQLite, or document tiers with no card required. For serverless Postgres with a generous compute allowance, Neon; for an all-in-one backend with auth and storage baked in, Supabase; for SQLite at the edge with zero cold starts, Cloudflare D1. The full databases category on FreeTier.co shows the current quota and whether a card is required for each.

For direct chat access, ChatGPT's free tier, Claude's free tier, and Google Gemini's free tier all give you daily message allowances without a card. For API access, Google's Gemini API and Groq have the most generous free developer tiers, and Hugging Face Inference includes a free budget. Browse the AI tools category, or see our ChatGPT vs Claude comparison.

Three habits: (1) always read the 'what happens after' line on the vendor's pricing page before you sign up, (2) set up billing alerts at 50% and 100% of your expected usage the moment you add a card, (3) prefer no-credit-card free tiers for experiments - Cloudflare, Netlify, Supabase, Neon, and most SaaS products don't require one. If a vendor insists on a card for their 'free' tier, assume you will eventually be billed.

No. FreeTier.co is an independent directory. We don't take affiliate commissions, sponsorships, or paid placement from any of the listed vendors. FTV scores are editorial and reflect our judgement of the free tier's value to builders, not what the vendor would like us to say. More on this at /about.

We publish a machine-readable index at /llms.txt and the full catalogue at /llms-full.txt, specifically so LLMs and research tools can cite the directory. We also publish an articles RSS feed. For larger-scale use or attribution questions, email contact@freetier.co.

Absolutely. We welcome community contributions. If you notice outdated information or want to suggest a new service, please contact us at contact@freetier.co.