Frontend hosting, PaaS & app deployment
15 providers and 226 verified findings for this front, as of 2026-10-22.
Mapping summary. Frontend/edge hosting and app-deployment PaaS that, as of 2026-10-22, has a genuine free tier, free-trial credit, student offer, or startup credit program — verified against official pages. 2025–26 shifts worth knowing: Netlify moved all new accounts to credit-based plans (Sep 4, 2025; Free = 300 credits/mo, thin ~15 GB); Railway restored a permanent $1/mo Free plan (Aug 27, 2025) after running it down in 2024; Render flattened Pro to $25/mo with unlimited seats and cut Hobby bandwidth from 100 GB to 5 GB (Apr 23, 2026); Koyeb (now under Mistral AI, Feb 2026) closed its free Starter plan to new users; Vercel's Hobby is strictly non-commercial. Defunct / no genuine free offer in this front: Glitch (stopped hosting projects Jul 8, 2025 under Fastly), Heroku (no free tier since Nov 2022; from $5/mo "Eco" dyno), Cyclic (cyclic.sh redirects to GitHub; effectively down), Deta (Hugging Face–acquired; deta.space unreachable), and Kinsta / Pantheon / Pika / Cloudron (no perpetual free tier for new users). Entries 13–16 are from secondary 2026 comparisons (Northflank, Val Town, Puter, HF Spaces) — confirm on the vendor page before relying on them.
Comparison table
| Provider | Best offer | Audience | Findings H / M / L | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Workers AI free tier: 10,000 free Neurons/day (no signup offer needed) | free-for-all, startup | 23 / 5 / 0 | developers.cloudflare.com |
| Deno Deploy | Deno Deploy Free plan (new platform, $0/mo) | free-for-all | 1 / 2 / 0 | deno.com |
| Fly.io | Fly.io Free Trial (2 VM hours / 7 days) | free-for-all | 3 / 1 / 0 | docs.fly.io |
| GitHub | GitHub Copilot Free (perpetual free tier, no credit card) | free-for-all, student | 40 / 82 / 0 | github.com |
| Hugging Face | Inference Providers free account: NO monthly credits (as of Oct 2026) | free-for-all | 10 / 2 / 3 | huggingface.co |
| Koyeb | Koyeb Startup Program — up to $30,000 in free compute credits | startup | 4 / 0 / 0 | koyeb.com |
| Netlify | Netlify Free plan (credit-based, current default) | free-for-all | 4 / 0 / 1 | netlify.com |
| Northflank | Developer Sandbox — always-free plan (2 services + 2 cron jobs + 1 database) | free-for-all | 1 / 2 / 0 | northflank.com |
| Puter | Free plan ($0/month consumer tier) | free-for-all | 3 / 1 / 0 | puter.com |
| Railway | Free plan ($0/mo, $1/mo usage credit, permanent) | free-for-all | 2 / 2 / 1 | railway.com |
| Render | Free web services (Free tier) | free-for-all | 6 / 1 / 0 | render.com |
| Replit | Starter free plan (current as of 2026-10-22) | free-for-all | 5 / 3 / 2 | docs.replit.com |
| Replit for Students | Free Starter tier (no subscription, no claim needed) | student | 3 / 2 / 0 | docs.replit.com |
| Val Town | Val Town Free plan — unlimited public vals at $0/mo | free-for-all | 2 / 0 / 0 | val.town |
| Vercel | Hobby plan (permanently free, no card) | free-for-all | 5 / 3 / 1 | vercel.com |
Other service fronts
- LLM & AI model APIs, inference and agent platforms
- Startup cloud-credit programs (VC / accelerator funded)
- Managed databases & data platforms
- VPS, bare-metal & dedicated servers
- Dev tools, IDEs, Git & CI/CD
- GPU, ML training & notebooks
- Observability, monitoring, uptime & CDN
- Auth, security, product analytics & feature flags
- Email, SMS, push & chat APIs
- API marketplaces, free public APIs, search & CMS
- Payments & fintech dev tools
- University & education-only programs (.edu / student email)
- Self-hosted open-source alternatives that replace paid SaaS
- Extras: gap-fill finds and providers outside the 14 fronts