What the score measures
FTV is a composite of four things: how durable the free offer is, how much it's worth in dollars, how much friction there is to sign up, and how many of the paid product's features the free tier actually includes. Each component is scored independently and then added together.
The FTV formula is recurrence + generosity + friction + feature parity, capped at 100.
1. Recurrence (0-30 points)
How durable is the free offer? Anchored to the listing type:
| Listing type | Points | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Always free | 30 | jsDelivr, BootstrapCDN |
| Free tier | 25 | AWS Lambda, Auth0, Supabase |
| Intro tier | 15 | AWS 12-month free tier |
| Free credit | 10 | $300 GCP starter credits |
| Free trial | 5 | 14-day Heroku trial |
2. Generosity (0-50 points)
How much is the free tier worth in dollars per month? Computed per listing type:
- Unbounded offerings (no caps at all) get the full 50 points.
- Free tier with caps: the lowest paid plan that exceeds the free cap, or for usage-based products, the sum of free quotas at paid rates. AWS Lambda's 1M requests + 400k GB-seconds comes to about $6.87/month.
- Intro tier: sum of all included components (e.g. 750h of a micro instance ≈ $8.50 + 30GB storage ≈ $3).
- Free credit: credit amount divided by 3 months, assuming a typical burn window.
- Free trial: cheapest paid plan × (trial days / 30). A 14-day trial on a $20 plan is worth about $9.
The dollar value is then mapped to points on a log scale, so small amounts still get meaningful credit but diminishing returns kick in fast:
| Dollar value / month | Points |
|---|---|
| $1 | 5 |
| $10 | 17 |
| $100 | 33 |
| $1,000 | 48 |
| Unbounded | 50 |
3. Friction (0-10 points)
Does signing up for the free tier require a credit card? That's a real-world friction barrier. A product that lets you start without a card gets the full 10 points. One that requires a card — or where the vendor's page doesn't make it clear either way — gets 0.
4. Feature parity (0-10 points)
How many of the paid product's core features are actually accessible from the free tier? A free tier that unlocks almost everything (just with smaller caps) scores 10. A free tier that's a heavily-restricted preview — no SSO, no integrations, no advanced features — scores lower. Most always-free products land at 10, most trials at 8-10.
Score bands
Scores cluster in the 20-80 range in practice. For quick scanning we group them:
Unbounded or effectively-unbounded free offerings. No friction, lots of headroom. GitHub Pages, BootstrapCDN, jsDelivr.
Genuine free tiers with real dollar value. Caps you'll hit eventually but plenty to build on for small-team workloads. Datadog, Supabase, AWS Lambda.
Short trials, small credits, or capped tiers where a credit card is required. Useful to try the product; less useful as a long-term free workload. Trials and small credit-based offers typically land here.
Where the data comes from
Every listing is scored against the vendor's own pricing page. We pull out the facts the score needs: the paid plans and their prices, the free-tier caps, whether a credit card is required to sign up, any starter credit amount, and the trial length. Those raw facts are then fed into the formula above.
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.
Limitations
- Estimates, not guarantees. The dollar value is an estimate based on what's on the pricing page. It's good for comparison but not for budgeting — always verify with the vendor's own calculator.
- Pricing changes. Vendors change their offerings regularly. If a score looks off, check the vendor's actual pricing page.
- Usage-based products are harder to price. Products that charge by the unit (Lambda, S3, DynamoDB) need us to multiply free quotas by paid rates. If any component is missed, the dollar value will read low.
- Some listings don't have a score. Vendors who hide pricing behind a sales contact or don't publish per-service rates leave us without data. We'd rather show nothing than fabricate a number.
- FTV compares apples to oranges. A $10/month monitoring tier and a $10/month image-processing tier are equivalent dollar value but aren't interchangeable. Use FTV for relative comparison within a category, not across unrelated tools.
Start comparing
Browse listings sorted by FTV, explore by type, or see the full directory.