Free tiers are genuinely useful and every one of them has an edge you can fall off. The three that catch people are egress billed separately from everything else, idle resources being reclaimed without much warning, and time-limited credits presented alongside always-free resources as though they were the same thing.
The comparison lists for this are all feature tables: this much compute, this much storage, this many requests. Those numbers are accurate and they are not what determines whether a free tier works for you. What determines it is the terms around them, and the terms are on a different page.
Table of contents
- Three kinds of free, which are not the same
- Egress, which is where free tiers stop being free
- Idle reclaim and sleeping
- The other terms worth reading
- Can you run production on one
- How to evaluate one properly
- How this fits the rest of the stack
- FAQ
Three kinds of free, which are not the same
Sorting the offers into these three categories first makes every comparison easier.
Always-free resource allowances. A defined quantity of compute, storage, or requests that remains free indefinitely, renewing monthly. This is the only kind you can build something lasting on. The allowances are usually modest and the terms occasionally change, but there is no expiry date.
Time-limited trials and credits. A monetary balance or a period of free access, expiring on a date. Useful for evaluating a platform and unsuitable as a foundation, because the end is scheduled. Presented on the same page as always-free resources, frequently with the larger number more prominent.
Free plans on developer platforms. A tier of an ordinary product priced at zero, typically with restrictions — a subdomain rather than a custom domain, a sleeping instance, limited build minutes, community support. These are honest about being small and are frequently the most practical option for a genuinely small project.
The first question to ask of any offer is which of these it is. A headline figure of several hundred in credits and an always-free allowance of one small instance are entirely different propositions, and they appear together constantly.
Egress, which is where free tiers stop being free
The single most common way a free tier produces a bill.
Compute, storage, and requests are usually what the allowance covers. Data leaving the provider’s network is frequently metered separately, sometimes with a small free allowance and sometimes from the first gigabyte.
This means the free tier is free while nobody is looking at your site. The moment it gets traffic, egress starts accruing, and egress scales with exactly the thing you wanted — visitors.
It bites hardest on anything media-heavy. A site serving images or video moves far more data per visitor than a text site, so a photography portfolio or a video project can generate meaningful egress at traffic levels that feel small.
What to check, specifically:
- Is egress included in the free tier at all, and if so how much?
- What is the rate beyond it?
- Does traffic between services within the same provider count, or only traffic leaving?
- Is there a cap or an alert, or does it simply accumulate?
The related trap is that egress is the one line you cannot control by being efficient with your code. You control it by serving smaller files — compressed images, correct formats, sensible caching — which is worth doing anyway and is the main lever available.
Idle reclaim and sleeping
Second most common surprise, and the one that affects reliability rather than cost.
Many free tiers reclaim resources that are not being used. Implementations vary: some sleep an instance after a period of inactivity and wake it on the next request, adding a cold start of anywhere from a second to considerably longer. Some suspend an account that has been inactive for a longer period. Some reclaim the resource entirely, with notice, and the notice goes to an email address you may not check.
For a hobby project this is usually tolerable. For anything with an audience it is not, because the first visitor after a quiet period gets the slow response, and for a low-traffic site that is a large share of your visitors.
It also interacts badly with monitoring. An uptime check every five minutes keeps the instance awake, which defeats the reclaim policy and in some cases violates the terms. Reading the acceptable use policy on this specific point is worth the two minutes.
What to check: is there an inactivity timeout, how long is the cold start, is there an inactivity policy for the account as a whole, and what notice is given before a resource is reclaimed?
The other terms worth reading
- Payment card required. Some free tiers need one on file, which is how a free tier becomes a bill. Others do not, and instead suspend when you exceed the allowance — which is safer if less convenient.
- Is there a hard cap? A provider that stops serving when you hit the limit protects you from a bill. One that continues and charges protects your availability. Know which you have, because they fail in opposite directions.
- Regional restrictions. Free allowances are sometimes limited to specific regions, which may not be near your users.
- What counts toward the allowance. Requests, compute seconds, and storage are metered in ways that differ enough that two tiers with identical headline numbers can differ substantially in practice.
- Support. Community forums rather than a support channel, which matters when something is broken and you have no leverage.
- Terms of service on commercial use. Some free tiers permit it and some restrict to personal or evaluation use.
- How much notice is given if the terms change. Free tiers have been reduced or withdrawn before, generally with notice, and always inconveniently.
That last point deserves weight when deciding what to build on a free tier. The offer is a business decision by the provider, and business decisions get revisited. Anything you would be genuinely upset to lose should be portable enough to move in a weekend.
Can you run production on one
The honest answer is that it depends on what production means for you, and the question is usually asked by someone hoping for yes.
Cases where it works: an internal tool used by a handful of people; a personal project with modest traffic; a static site, which is the strongest case because there is nothing to sleep and nothing to scale; a scheduled job that runs briefly; a staging environment where a cold start is irrelevant.
Cases where it does not: anything with customers who would notice a cold start; anything where an outage costs money or reputation; anything serving enough traffic to generate meaningful egress; anything you cannot afford to lose if the terms change.
The general shape: a free tier is a trial of the platform and a place for small things, not a hosting plan. Building a business on one means the business depends on a promise that carries no commitment and no support channel.
The practical middle position is to use free tiers for what they suit — learning, prototypes, side projects, static sites — and to move to something paid the moment anyone else depends on it. The cost of a small paid plan is usually trivial relative to caring about the outcome, and a genuinely small paid tier is more useful than a generous free one with an uncertain future. RunxBuild’s Free plan is deliberately in that shape: 0.1 vCPU and 512MB, 15 free days each month and $1.80 after, which is honest about its size and does not pretend to be a production plan.
How to evaluate one properly
Before building anything on a free tier, a short exercise that takes an hour and saves considerably more.
- Find the always-free allowance, separately from any trial credit. Write down the actual numbers.
- Find the egress terms. This is the one most likely to be on a different page.
- Find the inactivity and reclaim policy.
- Check whether a payment card is required and what happens at the limit — suspension or billing.
- Deploy something real and let it run for a week.
- Look at the usage dashboard and see what proportion of the allowance a week of actual use consumed.
- Multiply by four and decide whether the monthly figure has headroom or is already close.
- Set a billing alert regardless of whether you think you can be charged.
Step six is the one people skip and the one that answers the question. An allowance that sounds generous can be half-consumed by a week of light use, and finding that out in week one is better than in month three.
And keep the project portable while you evaluate. Code in a repository, data in a standard format, configuration in environment variables. Then if the free tier turns out not to fit, moving is an afternoon rather than a rebuild.
How this fits the rest of the stack
Free tiers are useful for prototypes, learning, static sites, and small internal tools, and they have edges: egress metered separately, idle resources reclaimed, and credits presented as though they were permanent. Separate always-free from time-limited before comparing anything, read the egress terms, and set a billing alert whether or not you think you can be charged. The RunxBuild hosting calculator shows what a small project costs when it stops being small, which is the number worth knowing before the free tier’s edge finds you.
Useful related references:
- Fly.io Free Tier: What Still Feels Free in 2026
- Netlify Free Plan: How to Read a Free Tier Before You Depend On It
- Docker Pricing: Personal, Pro, Team, Business (and the Free Tier)
- Builds on RunxBuild
FAQ
Which cloud has the best free tier?
It depends on what you are running, and the more useful question is which parts of an offer are always-free versus a time-limited credit. Compare the persistent allowances only, then check the egress terms and the idle-reclaim policy, since those determine whether the tier works in practice more than the headline compute figure does.
Is the AWS free tier really free?
The always-free components are, within their limits. The twelve-month components expire, and a payment card is required, so exceeding an allowance results in charges rather than suspension. Data transfer out is the line most likely to produce an unexpected bill. Set a budget alert before creating any resource.
Can I run production on a free tier?
For an internal tool, a static site, or a personal project, often yes. For anything with customers, an outage cost, or meaningful traffic, no — cold starts from idle reclaim, metered egress, and terms that can change without a support channel are all real risks. A free tier is a trial of the platform, not a hosting plan.
Why did my free tier generate a bill?
Almost always egress — data leaving the provider’s network is frequently metered separately from the compute and storage the allowance covers, so the tier is free until you have visitors. The other common causes are a resource left running past a twelve-month trial component and a usage-based service in a retry loop.
What is the difference between free credits and a free tier?
Credits are a monetary balance that expires on a date, after which normal billing resumes. A free tier is a resource allowance that renews and persists. They are frequently listed on the same page with the larger credit figure more prominent, and only the always-free part is something you can build on long term.