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Free Tier Glossary

Plain-English definitions of the units vendors use to describe free-tier limits, with the tracked services whose published limits use each term.

Monthly Active Users

Distinct users who sign in or are active at least once in a calendar month. Auth providers usually cap free tiers by MAU rather than by total sign-ups.

Used by 9 tracked services, including Supabase, Neon, Auth0, Stytch, Kinde, Firebase Authentication, Ably, Appwrite Cloud.

Outbound Data Transfer

Data sent out of a provider to users or other services. Free tiers often cap egress per month and charge per GB above it; some storage providers waive it.

Used by 29 tracked services, including Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages, Render, Deno Deploy, Firebase App Hosting, Supabase, Neon.

Requests and Invocations

The number of HTTP calls, function invocations or API queries counted against a quota, usually per day or per month.

Used by 21 tracked services, including Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy, MailerSend, ImageKit, Cloudflare Workers AI, PostHog.

Active CPU Time

CPU time actually spent running your code, excluding time waiting on I/O. Serverless platforms increasingly meter free tiers this way.

Used by 13 tracked services, including Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, Render, Deno Deploy, Supabase, Aiven for PostgreSQL, Railway, Prisma Compute.

Memory Time (GB-Hours)

Memory allocated multiplied by how long it was held, for example 1 GiB for 1 hour = 1 GiB-hr. Used to meter serverless functions and instances.

Used by 7 tracked services, including Vercel, Netlify, Deno Deploy, Axiom, Convex, Prisma Compute, Nhost.

Usage Credits

A prepaid or monthly allowance converted into usage at published rates. Free credits may reset monthly or be one-off and can expire.

Used by 16 tracked services, including Netlify, Brevo, CockroachDB Cloud, Cloudinary, Cloudflare Workers AI, Railway, Inngest, Trigger.dev.

Concurrent Runs

How many jobs, builds or connections can run at the same time. Free tiers often allow only one or a handful.

Used by 12 tracked services, including Deno Deploy, Pusher Channels, Inngest, Trigger.dev, Ably, Upstash QStash, Firebase Realtime Database, Cloudflare Browser Rendering.

Data and Log Retention

How long logs, events, analytics or traces are kept before deletion. Free tiers commonly keep data for 1 to 30 days.

Used by 25 tracked services, including Cloudflare Workers, Mailgun, MailerSend, Clerk, UploadThing, UptimeRobot, Grafana Cloud, PostHog.

Included Storage

Disk, database or object storage included before overage or a hard stop. Check whether the figure is per project, per database or per account.

Used by 39 tracked services, including Deno Deploy, Firebase App Hosting, Supabase, Neon, MongoDB Atlas, Turso, Cloudflare D1, Aiven for PostgreSQL.

Scale to Zero and Sleeping

A free instance or database that suspends when idle and wakes on the next request, adding a cold-start delay to that first request.

Used by 9 tracked services, including Supabase, Neon, Koyeb Postgres, Prisma Compute, Hugging Face Spaces, CloudAMQP, Nhost, Upstash Workflow.

Definitions are general guidance; each vendor's own pricing page is the authority on how it counts usage.