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What Happens When You Hit a Free Tier Limit?
Headline limits say how much you get; this page groups 39 of the 110 free tiers we track by what happens when you run out, based on the catch recorded from each vendor's pricing or limits page. A service can appear in more than one group. Always confirm at the source.
Paused or Scaled to Zero (8)
| Service | Category | What the vendor says | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supabase (Free) | Databases | Free projects pause after 1 week of inactivity. source | |
| Neon (Free) | Databases | 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. source | |
| Koyeb Postgres (Free) | Databases | Scale-to-zero on inactivity. source | |
| Prisma Compute (Free) | Hosting | TypeScript app hosting co-located with Prisma Postgres; idle apps scale to zero. source | |
| Hugging Face Spaces (Free) | Hosting | 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. source | |
| Nhost (Starter) | Databases | Projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity; backups and point-in-time recovery need Pro (from $25/month). source | |
| Upstash Box (Free) | Hosting | Sandboxes for AI agents; boxes freeze when idle and agents use your own model provider key, billed separately by that provider. source | |
| Appwrite Cloud (Free) | Databases | 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. source |
Blocked or Returns Errors (19)
| Service | Category | What the vendor says | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resend (Free) | 100/day cap bites before the monthly limit. 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. source | ||
| Neon (Free) | Databases | 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. source | |
| Cloudflare D1 | Databases | Queries error once daily limits are hit. source | |
| ImageKit (Forever free) | Storage & media | No overage on free: limits are hard. source | |
| Cloudflare Workers AI | AI APIs | 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. source | |
| Cloudflare Workers KV | Databases | 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. source | |
| Cloudflare Durable Objects | Realtime & search | 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). source | |
| Vercel Blob (Hobby) | Storage & media | Hobby limits are hard: exceed them and Blob is blocked until the 30-day window resets. source | |
| Upstash QStash (Free) | Background jobs | Daily message cap; pay-as-you-go is $1 per 100K messages. source | |
| Tinybird (Free) | Databases | 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. source | |
| Mux Video (Free) | Storage & media | 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. source | |
| Cloudflare Hyperdrive | Databases | 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. source | |
| Firebase Hosting (Spark) | Hosting | 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. source | |
| Cloudflare Images (Free) | Storage & media | 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. source | |
| Cloudflare Workflows (Workers Free) | Background jobs | Step and storage billing started 10 Aug 2026; on Free, an instance that tries to store state past the storage limit throws an error. source | |
| LiveKit Cloud (Build) | Realtime & search | 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. source | |
| Microsoft Clarity (Free) | Monitoring & analytics | 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. 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. source |
Billed or Upgrade Required (17)
| Service | Category | What the vendor says | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Render (Hobby) | Hosting | Free instances have limitations (see Render docs); compute beyond free instances is billed. source | |
| Firebase App Hosting | Hosting | App Hosting requires the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan (shown as not applicable on Spark). source | |
| New Relic (Free) | Monitoring & analytics | Only one full platform user on Free; data ingest beyond 100 GB/month is billed at $0.40/GB. source | |
| PostHog | Monitoring & analytics | 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. source | |
| Axiom (Personal) | Monitoring & analytics | 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). source | |
| Convex (Free) | Databases | Starter is pay-as-you-go beyond Free included amounts. Professional starts at $25/developer/month. source | |
| Algolia (Grow, free usage) | Realtime & search | 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). source | |
| Trigger.dev (Free) | Background jobs | Once the $5 of monthly credits is used, you must upgrade to keep running tasks. source | |
| Upstash QStash (Free) | Background jobs | Daily message cap; pay-as-you-go is $1 per 100K messages. source | |
| Mux Video (Free) | Storage & media | 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. source | |
| Firebase Hosting (Spark) | Hosting | 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. source | |
| Cloudflare AI Gateway | AI APIs | 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. source | |
| Upstash Workflow (Free) | Background jobs | 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. source | |
| Upstash Box (Free) | Hosting | Sandboxes for AI agents; boxes freeze when idle and agents use your own model provider key, billed separately by that provider. source | |
| GitHub Actions (GitHub Free) | CI & dev environments | 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. source | |
| GitHub Codespaces (GitHub Free) | CI & dev environments | Included usage applies to personal accounts; anything beyond it is billed to the account owner. Not available for repositories owned by managed user accounts. source | |
| Google Cloud Run (Free tier) | Hosting | 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. source |
FAQ
What happens when you exceed a free tier limit?
It depends on the vendor. Of the 110 free tiers we track, 8 pause or scale to zero (e.g. Supabase, Neon, Koyeb Postgres), 19 block requests or return errors at the cap (e.g. Resend, Mailgun, Neon), and 17 bill usage or require an upgrade (e.g. Render, Firebase App Hosting, New Relic). Each behaviour is quoted from the vendor's own page and dated.
Will a free tier charge my card if I go over?
Most free plans either stop or degrade rather than charge, but some move you onto pay-as-you-go or need a card on file. Check the "Billed or Upgrade Required" group below and confirm on the vendor's pricing page before relying on a free plan in production.
See also: Free Tier Fine Print · Daily Limits · Changelog