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Free Tier Fine Print: What's the Catch?
Headline limits rarely tell the whole story. Below is the catch we recorded for 100 of the 110 free tiers we track (pausing, hard caps, branding, commercial-use rules, upgrade triggers), copied from each vendor's own pricing or limits page and dated. 10 services have no notable catch beyond their listed limits. Always confirm at the source.
Hosting
- Vercel (Hobby): Hobby plan; team collaboration needs Pro ($20/mo). (checked , source)
- Netlify (Free): Credit-based: 300 credits covers e.g. 20 production deploys, or 15 GB bandwidth. Next step up is Personal at $9/mo with 1,000 credits. (checked , source)
- Cloudflare Pages: Pages Functions count against the Workers Free quota. (checked , source)
- Cloudflare Workers (Free): 10 ms CPU cap per request is the main constraint. (checked , source)
- GitHub Pages: Public repos only on GitHub Free; not allowed as hosting for commercial/SaaS sites. (checked , source)
- Render (Hobby): Free instances have limitations (see Render docs); compute beyond free instances is billed. (checked , source)
- Deno Deploy (Free): No wildcard subdomains on Free. (checked , source)
- Firebase App Hosting: App Hosting requires the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan (shown as not applicable on Spark). (checked , source)
- Railway (Free): Free plan is usage-limited ($1 monthly credit, does not roll over). Hobby is $5/mo with $5 included usage. (checked , source)
- Prisma Compute (Free): TypeScript app hosting co-located with Prisma Postgres; idle apps scale to zero. (checked , source)
- Hugging Face Spaces (Free): Creating Gradio or Docker Spaces on compute now needs a paid plan (PRO from $9/month), except up to 2 ZeroGPU Gradio Spaces; free-hardware Spaces go to sleep when unused. (checked , source)
- Firebase Hosting (Spark): The 360 MB/day transfer cap is enforced daily (about 10 GB a month), so a traffic spike can exhaust it in one day. Upgrading to Blaze keeps the same free amounts, then bills $0.15/GB. (checked , source)
- Cloudflare Browser Rendering (Workers Free): Headless Chrome on Cloudflare; the 10-minute daily allowance is shared across all methods. Workers Paid includes 10 hours/month, then $0.09/hour. (checked , source)
- Val Town (Free): No custom domains on Free, and email can only be sent to yourself; Pro is $21/mo. (checked , source)
- Upstash Box (Free): Sandboxes for AI agents; boxes freeze when idle and agents use your own model provider key, billed separately by that provider. (checked , source)
- Google Cloud Run (Free tier): Needs a Google Cloud billing account. The free tier is a monthly spending-based discount at us-central1 Tier 1 prices, shared across all projects on the billing account; usage past it is billed. (checked , source)
- Resend (Free): 100/day cap bites before the monthly limit. (checked , source)
- Mailgun (Free): 100 emails a day hard cap, 1 day of log retention and 1 user only; paid Basic starts at $15/mo for 10,000 emails. (checked , source)
- Postmark (Free): Positioned for testing integrations, not production. (checked , source)
- Brevo (Free): Sending starts after account approval. (checked , source)
- MailerSend (Free): Card details required at signup to prevent abuse (not charged). The old 1,000 API requests/day, 10-template tier is now the paid Hobby plan ($7/mo, or $5.60/mo billed yearly). (checked , source)
- Mailjet (Free): Mailjet logo on free emails (removed from Essential). (checked , source)
- Loops (Free): Free emails carry a 'Powered by Loops' footer; the 4,000-send cap counts transactional and marketing together. (checked , source)
- Mailtrap (Free): The monthly and daily quotas are shared between sending and receiving. Basic starts at $15/month for 10,000 emails. (checked , source)
- Novu (Free): Notification infrastructure, not a mail sender: you still connect your own email/SMS providers. Removing Novu branding needs Pro (from $30/month). (checked , source)
- Cloudflare Email Routing (Workers Free): Sending to arbitrary recipients needs Workers Paid. Sends to verified destination addresses stay free. Workers that handle routed email still count against Workers Free CPU and memory limits. (checked , source)
- SMTP2GO (Free): Sending stops at 1,000 a month: further sends are rejected, not queued, and there is no overage on Free. Live chat and phone support only for the first 14 days. Starter is $10/month for 10,000 emails. (checked , source)
Databases
- Supabase (Free): Free projects pause after 1 week of inactivity. (checked , source)
- Neon (Free): Compute scales to zero after 5 minutes idle (can't be disabled); running out of CU-hours or egress suspends compute until the next period, and going over 1 GB storage blocks writes. (checked , source)
- MongoDB Atlas (Free): Aimed at learning and exploring; no backups on the free tier. (checked , source)
- Cloudflare D1: Queries error once daily limits are hit. (checked , source)
- Aiven for PostgreSQL (Free): Cannot choose cloud/region; no integrations or connection pooling; a single backup only (no point-in-time recovery). Aiven may shut down free services unused for an extended period. The Developer plan ($5/month) raises storage to 8 GB. (checked , source)
- Koyeb Postgres (Free): Scale-to-zero on inactivity. (checked , source)
- CockroachDB Cloud (Cockroach Continuum): No permanent free tier listed on the pricing page: trial credit only. Pricing is now sold under the Cockroach Continuum name for new deployments from 15 Sep 2026. (checked , source)
- Convex (Free): Starter is pay-as-you-go beyond Free included amounts. Professional starts at $25/developer/month. (checked , source)
- Pinecone (Starter): Choosing cloud/region and multiple projects needs Builder ($20/month flat). (checked , source)
- Cloudflare Workers KV: Included in the Workers Free plan; limits reset daily at 00:00 UTC and operations fail with an error once a limit is hit. Max 1 write per second to the same key. (checked , source)
- Prisma Postgres (Free): Every query counts as one operation; no backups or spend limits on Free. The Accelerate cache retires on 1 December 2026. (checked , source)
- Upstash Vector (Free): Capped at 1,536 dimensions (paid plans go to 3,072+). (checked , source)
- Qdrant Cloud (Free): Single node only, for testing and prototypes; no high availability or backups on Free. (checked , source)
- Tinybird (Free): Managed ClickHouse for real-time analytics APIs; the 1,000 queries/day cap is enforced with warning and alert emails at 75% and 100%. No credit card required. (checked , source)
- Zilliz Cloud (Free): Managed Milvus vector database; the Free plan is pitched at learning and personal projects, with SLAs, backups and scaling on paid plans. (checked , source)
- Nhost (Starter): Projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity; backups and point-in-time recovery need Pro (from $25/month). (checked , source)
- Cloudflare Hyperdrive: Included in the Workers Free plan; every SQL statement (reads, writes and schema changes) counts as a query, limits reset daily at 00:00 UTC and queries fail once the limit is hit. You still need your own Postgres or MySQL database. (checked , source)
- Firebase Realtime Database (Spark): 100 simultaneous connections is the main ceiling on Spark; multiple database instances per project need the Blaze plan. (checked , source)
- Cloudflare Vectorize: Included in Workers Free. Dimensions, not vectors, are metered: 5M stored dimensions is about 6,500 vectors at 768 dimensions. Queries from the HTTP API and Wrangler CLI count too. (checked , source)
- Sanity (Free): Headless CMS content backend. Free datasets must be public, and extra documents, requests or bandwidth are not available on Free (Growth is $15 per seat/month). (checked , source)
- Appwrite Cloud (Free): Hitting a Free limit freezes the affected service until the next billing cycle or an upgrade; each account can have only one Free organization. Compare the pricing page for current rows such as reads and writes. (checked , source)
- Redis Cloud (Free): 30 MB fills quickly beyond caching or sessions; Essentials (250 MB+) starts at $0.007/hour, about $5/month. (checked , source)
- TiDB Cloud Starter: The allowance is per organization, split as 5 GiB row storage, 5 GiB columnar storage and 50M RUs per instance across up to five instances. Beyond it you pay from $0.10 per million RUs and $0.20/GiB-month row storage; set a spend limit to cap it. (checked , source)
Auth
- Clerk (Hobby): Hobby: up to 3 social connections, no MFA or passkeys; one-month grace period if you go above 50K MRU. (checked , source)
- WorkOS AuthKit: SSO/directory sync are priced separately; each additional 1M users is $2,500/mo. (checked , source)
- Kinde (Free): If you bill your customers through Kinde there is a 0.7% per-transaction fee; Free includes 1 webhook and 2 environments (production and development). (checked , source)
- Cloudflare Turnstile (Free): A CAPTCHA alternative for bot checks on forms and logins, not a user login system. Any-hostname widgets and removing Cloudflare branding are Enterprise only. (checked , source)
- Logto Cloud (Free): No MFA, organizations (multi-tenancy), enterprise SSO or RBAC on Free; those are Pro add-ons. Pro starts at $24/month with 50K tokens included, then $0.08 per 100 extra tokens. Open-source core can be self-hosted. (checked , source)
Storage & Media
- Cloudflare R2: Free tier only applies to Standard storage. (checked , source)
- Cloudinary (Free): Credits are shared across storage, bandwidth and transformations. (checked , source)
- ImageKit (Forever free): No overage on free: limits are hard. (checked , source)
- Vercel Blob (Hobby): Hobby limits are hard: exceed them and Blob is blocked until the 30-day window resets. (checked , source)
- Mux Video (Free): Free plan stores at most 10 videos and has no live streaming; pay-as-you-go removes the storage cap and adds a $20 monthly usage credit. (checked , source)
- Cloudflare Images (Free): Past 5,000 unique transformations, new transformations return a 9422 error until the month resets (cached ones keep serving); you are never charged on Free. (checked , source)
- Upstash Blob (Free): Over the free limit, the bucket stops serving requests until the 30-day window rolls over; the free plan is never charged. S3-compatible. (checked , source)
AI APIs
- Groq (Free plan): Limits vary per model. (checked , source)
- Cohere (Trial key): Trial keys are for evaluation; production keys are paid. The 1,000 calls/month cap also applies to production keys on newer Command A variants (A+, Reasoning, Vision, Translate). (checked , source)
- Cloudflare Workers AI: Resets daily 00:00 UTC; requests fail once the 10,000 Neurons are used. Some newer frontier models (for example Kimi K2.6, GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4) need the Workers Paid plan or prepaid AI Gateway credits. (checked , source)
- Google Gemini API (Free): Exact RPM/TPM/RPD vary by model and usage tier; check AI Studio. Flagship models (e.g. Gemini 4 Argon) are not on Free. Paid tier required for higher limits and some models. (checked , source)
- OpenRouter (Free): Free plan covers free models only; paid models use credits with a 5.5% platform fee (Standard). (checked , source)
- Cloudflare AI Gateway: Model usage is still billed by each provider; buying credits through Unified Billing adds a 5% fee. Gateways created from 24 Sep 2026 log to Workers Logs and follow its limits. (checked , source)
Monitoring & Analytics
- Better Stack (Free): Free plan is for personal projects; logs and traces are kept for only 3 days. (checked , source)
- UptimeRobot (Free): Free plan allows personal and commercial use, but checks only every 5 minutes, with no team (notify or login) seats. (checked , source)
- Grafana Cloud (Free): Community support only; Pro starts at $19/mo platform fee plus usage. (checked , source)
- New Relic (Free): Only one full platform user on Free; data ingest beyond 100 GB/month is billed at $0.40/GB. (checked , source)
- PostHog: Allowance resets monthly, card or not. The no-card Free plan has 1 project and 1-year data retention, and usage stops at the limits (extra events are dropped); pay-as-you-go keeps the same free allowance and adds 6 projects. (checked , source)
- Axiom (Personal): Personal plan is for individual developers and small projects (community support). Pay-as-you-go adds a $25/month platform fee with a larger always-free allowance (1 TB loading, 100 GB-hours query, 100 GB storage). (checked , source)
- Checkly (Hobby): Hobby runs from 6 public locations (max 3 per check), has no SMS or phone alerts and no custom status-page domain. (checked , source)
- Healthchecks.io (Hobbyist): No SMS, WhatsApp or phone-call credits on Hobbyist. The $5/mo Supporter plan keeps the same 20 jobs; Business ($20/mo) raises it to 100 jobs with 50 SMS/WhatsApp and 20 phone-call credits. Using multiple accounts to dodge limits counts as abuse. (checked , source)
- Umami Cloud (Hobby): No API or MCP access on Hobby, and no extra events; Pro is $20/month for 1 million events and up to 20 websites. (checked , source)
- Cronitor (Hacker): No SMS alerts, synthetic browser checks or on-call integrations (PagerDuty, OpsGenie) on Hacker. Business is $2/month per monitor plus $5/month per user, with no base fee. (checked , source)
- Microsoft Clarity (Free): Session replay and heatmaps, not server or error monitoring. Recordings older than 30 days are deleted unless favourited or labelled. Microsoft says Clarity data helps improve its machine learning models. (checked , source)
- Cloudflare Web Analytics: Privacy-focused page views and Core Web Vitals, not product analytics: no custom events or funnels. Sites outside Cloudflare's proxy are capped at 10 and need the JS beacon added by hand; path rules need a paid plan. (checked , source)
Realtime & Search
- Pusher Channels (Sandbox): Sandbox is the only free plan; paid plans start at Startup $49/month. (checked , source)
- Algolia (Grow, free usage): Pay-as-you-go plan: beyond the included usage it bills $0.50 per 1K search requests and $0.40 per 1K records. Algolia also lists a separate Free plan (10K search requests/month, 50K records, 5K recommendation requests, 5K crawls). (checked , source)
- Ably (Free): Ably now prices by monthly active users: Free covers up to 500 MAUs with best-effort community and email support; Pro starts at $29/month for 1K MAUs. Message history is kept 24 hours by default (30 days max) on Free. (checked , source)
- Cloudflare Durable Objects: Workers Free can only use SQLite-backed Durable Objects; requests include WebSocket messages and alarms. Operations fail once a daily limit is hit (reset 00:00 UTC). (checked , source)
- LiveKit Cloud (Build): Build plan allowances are a hard cap: exceeding them fails new requests rather than billing. Free projects share allowances across a user's free projects; unused credits do not roll over. (checked , source)
Background Jobs
- Inngest (Free): No credit card required; Pro starts at $99/mo. (checked , source)
- Trigger.dev (Free): Once the $5 of monthly credits is used, you must upgrade to keep running tasks. (checked , source)
- Cloudflare Queues: Each message usually costs about 3 operations (write, read, delete), so roughly 3,300 messages/day on Free. Paid plan retention is configurable up to 14 days. (checked , source)
- Upstash QStash (Free): Daily message cap; pay-as-you-go is $1 per 100K messages. (checked , source)
- Hookdeck Event Gateway (Developer): Single user only on Developer; Team plan (from $39/month) adds pay-as-you-go, 7-day retention and unlimited users. (checked , source)
- CloudAMQP (Little Lemur): For development only: shared broker, and idle queues are removed after 28 days. Next plan (Tough Tiger) is $19/month. (checked , source)
- Cloudflare Workflows (Workers Free): Step and storage billing started 10 Aug 2026; on Free, an instance that tries to store state past the storage limit throws an error. (checked , source)
- Upstash Workflow (Free): Retries count as extra billed steps, and context.call / context.invoke count as two steps each; pay-as-you-go is $1 per 100K steps. (checked , source)
- CloudAMQP LavinMQ (Loyal Lemming): Shared broker for development, prototypes and small hobby projects. LavinMQ is AMQP-compatible but not RabbitMQ itself; the next plan (Elegant Ermine) is $19/month. (checked , source)
CI & Dev Environments
- GitHub Actions (GitHub Free): Private-repo usage is now metered in dollars, not minutes: each runner type draws its own rate from the $12 monthly allowance. Larger runners are billed even in public repos. Self-hosted runners are free. (checked , source)
- GitHub Codespaces (GitHub Free): Included usage applies to personal accounts; anything beyond it is billed to the account owner. Not available for repositories owned by managed user accounts. (checked , source)
- Doppler (Developer): Secrets manager rather than CI. Change requests, SAML SSO, RBAC and automatic secret rotation need Team ($21/user/month). (checked , source)
- GitLab CI/CD (GitLab.com Free): A credit or debit card is required to use GitLab's shared runners on Free (verified with a $1 authorisation, not charged); bring your own runner to avoid it. The 5-user cap applies to private top-level groups. Premium ($29/user/month) includes 10,000 minutes. (checked , source)
- CircleCI (Free): Minutes depend on the resource class: Linux Medium uses 10 credits a minute, so 30,000 credits is about 3,000 minutes. Free credits expire monthly and do not roll over. Open-source projects can get up to 400,000 credits a month on Linux, Arm and Docker. (checked , source)
- Infisical (Free): Secrets manager rather than CI. No secret versioning, point-in-time recovery, rotation or audit log retention on Free; Pro is $20 per identity/month (annual). The MIT-licensed core is free to self-host. (checked , source)
See also: Glossary · Alternatives · Changelog