Streamlit Community Cloud: free credits and offers
Best offer on record: Community Cloud free hosting (general free tier, open to all users including students and startups). 2 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
Community Cloud free hosting (general free tier, open to all users including students and startups) high confidence
Official docs say you can create, deploy and manage Streamlit apps 'all for free', and that your account 'connects directly to your GitHub repositories (public or private)'. streamlit.io/cloud says 'Totally free'. This is a general free tier, not a student- or startup-specific program. Official limits on the manage-your-app page, stated 'as of February 2024' and 'may change at any time without notice': CPU 0.078 cores minimum to 2 cores maximum; memory 690MB minimum to 2.7GBs maximum; storage no minimum to 50GB maximum. Official sleep rule ('App hibernation'): 'All apps without traffic for 12 hours go to sleep'; anyone with view access can wake the app with 'Yes, get this app back up!'. Official private-app rule (share-your-app page): 'You are only allowed one private app at a time.' Unlimited public apps comes from a March 2023 forum reply by Caroline and is not restated on the official pages checked. Sources: https://docs.streamlit.io/deploy/streamlit-community-cloud ; https://docs.streamlit.io/deploy/streamlit-community-cloud/share-your-app ; https://docs.streamlit.io/deploy/streamlit-community-cloud/status ; https://streamlit.io/cloud
Eligibility
Any individual who can sign in with GitHub and has administrative permission on the repository they deploy from (official status page: 'a developer must have administrative permissions to a repository to deploy apps from it'). No student, startup, nonprofit or identity check, and no payment step, is described on the official pages checked. Private-repo deploys need the GitHub 'repo' OAuth scope (official status page).
How to claim
Sign in with GitHub at share.streamlit.io (streamlit.io/cloud: 'Sign in with Github'), pick the repo, branch and file, then click Deploy. No application form is involved.
Expiry
None stated. No trial or end date; the limits can change at any time without notice.
Gotchas
(1) Resource figures are dated 'as of February 2024' even in the 2026 docs, and older forum posts cite a 1GB limit; use the official figures and confirm in-app. (2) Apps sleep after 12 hours without traffic and need a manual wake; visiting keeps them awake. (3) One private app at a time; deploying another private-repo app requires making the existing one public or deleting it (official). (4) Over-limit apps 'may slow down from throttling or become nonfunctional'; the official fix list is reboot, st.cache_data or st.cache_resource, cache limits, moving big data to a database, and profiling memory. (5) No SLA: a May 2023 community forum reply says Streamlit Cloud has no service level agreement (forum, not official). (6) Unverified third-party 2026 claims (fastero.com blog): accounts locked with HTTP 403 for undocumented fair-use limits, custom domains not supported, and repo commits no longer waking a sleeping app. None of these appear on the official pages checked; do not publish them as fact without confirmation.
Free resource increase for nonprofit or educational organizations (case-by-case, via request form) medium confidence
Official knowledge-base page: 'We offer free resource increases only to support nonprofits or educational organizations on a case-by-case basis.' The linked request form (titled 'Streamlit Community Cloud Resource Increase Request') targets 'good-for-the-world' use cases, generally an educational institution or nonprofit organization, open-source work, or public-benefit apps. It says apps 'primarily used by a for-profit company' do not qualify, and that you should 'implement caching before requesting increased resources'. No amounts or new limit values are stated. Review is 'as soon as possible' with no timeframe. After the increase is applied, the Streamlit marketing team sends a confirmation email. The fetched copy did not show the form fields. Sources: https://docs.streamlit.io/knowledge-base/deploy/resource-limits ; https://info.snowflake.com/streamlit-resource-increase-request.html
Eligibility
Nonprofit or educational organizations (KB page). The form's wording is broader (good-for-the-world, open-source, public-benefit) but excludes apps primarily used by a for-profit company. Individual students and startups are not named. A student project or startup app likely qualifies only if it serves an educational institution, nonprofit or public-benefit purpose; the reviewer decides.
How to claim
1) Add caching first (st.cache_data or st.cache_resource, per the form). 2) Complete https://info.snowflake.com/streamlit-resource-increase-request.html and describe the nonprofit, educational or public-benefit use. 3) Wait for review; the confirmation email comes from Streamlit marketing once the increase is applied. A December 2022 forum reply by Caroline pointed to support@streamlit.io for educational or nonprofit requests; the current KB page points to the form instead.
Expiry
None stated. No deadline on the KB page or the form. Approval is case-by-case and not guaranteed.
Gotchas
No amounts or new limit values are published, so the size of any increase is unknown, and no review timeframe is given. For-profit apps are excluded. The form page footer reads 'Copyright 2024 Snowflake Inc.' while the docs footers read 2026, and the fetched form copy included leftover template-looking text (placeholder names and job titles), so confirm the form is current before relying on it.
Verdict: a genuine free offer exists, but it is general free hosting open to everyone, including students and startups (finding 1), not a student or startup program. The only official extra free benefit is the case-by-case resource increase for nonprofit or educational organizations (finding 2). No startup program was found on the Streamlit pages checked; Snowflake's own startup and student programs were not checked. Status 2025-2026: no closure or change announcement was found on the official pages checked. The 2026-footer docs still list the February 2024 limits, the 12-hour sleep rule and the one-private-app rule. Unverified leads, not carried as findings: (a) A March 2023 forum reply by Caroline (discuss.streamlit.io/t/more-private-projects/39717) said 'we do offer increased private apps through our education program if you're a student or educator, and we run contests a few times a year where you can win hosting for additional private apps.' No current official page checked mentions an education program or contests, and the official share-your-app page says 'You are only allowed one private app at a time', so treat this as probably inactive unless Streamlit confirms it. (b) A 2021 forum thread asked about a student benefit (discuss.streamlit.io/t/streamlit-cluld-for-student/18075); it was auto-closed with no confirmed answer. (c) Staff said in November and December 2022 that there are no paid Community Cloud plans. Streamlit in Snowflake is a separate Snowflake product; streamlit.io/cloud shows a Snowflake option labeled 'Pro' with 'Start the trial now!' but no price, trial length or terms, and it was not verified as a student or startup offer. Research limits: WebSearch returned a shared-session budget-exhausted notice on its 3rd and 4th searches, so 2025-2026 news and the education-program status were not searched, and I did not work around the limit. streamlit.io/terms-of-service returned 404, streamlit.io/pricing returned 404, and blog.streamlit.io returned 403. Context7 MCP was not among the available tools, so official docs were read with WebFetch. Quotes come from WebFetch summaries and should be spot-checked before publication.