Best offer on record: Val Town Free plan — unlimited public vals at $0/mo. 2 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
Val Town Free plan — unlimited public vals at $0/mo high confidence
Perpetual $0/mo free tier. Verified today on val.town/pricing and docs.val.town/faq: unlimited public vals, 100,000 runs/day, 15-min cron intervals, 1-min wall clock time per run, 3 days log retention, no custom domains, 'email yourself', MCP integration, CLI (vt), and a SQLite database + S3 blob storage (every val got a database on 2026-01-23). docs.val.town/vals/limitations adds: max 1,000 files per val, max 100 branches per val, 0 private/unlisted vals on Free (Pro: unlimited private). Paid context: Pro $25/mo or $21/mo billed yearly; Business $200/mo or $167/mo billed yearly. No egress/bandwidth cap is published for any plan; no per-user seat cap stated for Free. For comparison, free Pro trial: none found.
Eligibility
Open to everyone; no .edu email, no startup age/funding cap, no region limits stated on any official page. No credit card required for the free plan (free signup is via GitHub/Google/email at val.town/auth/signup; the page itself returned 403 to the fetcher, so this is inferred from the FAQ's 'you can start using Val Town on a Free account' and the absence of any billing step on the free column — Pro checkout is Stripe-based).
How to claim
Sign up free at https://val.town/auth/signup (no billing step), then deploy serverless JS/TS vals to a val.town subdomain (yourname.val.town) with one-click forking of existing vals, or run `npx vt` / the MCP server. Free plan is automatic; no code or application needed.
Expiry
No expiry; perpetual free plan. Logs retained only 3 days on Free. No renewal step — free stays free until downgraded/changed by Val Town.
Gotchas
Free users get 0 private/unlisted vals — everything is public; private vals require Pro ($21-25/mo). 1-min wall clock per run and 100k runs/day are hard caps. No bandwidth/egress numbers published (limits page exists for 'granular details' per the pricing page but docs pages fetched gave no egress figures). Val Town runs built-in AI per-user-pay (see separate finding). Free tier is user-pays for AI, not a trial — it is genuinely $0 with no time limit.
Free tier includes $1/mo Townie (AI) credit; AI usage is pay-per-use after high confidence
As of the June 11, 2025 'Townie Credits' post, Val Town's built-in AI coding agent (Townie) is pay-per-use with a 50% markup over raw LLM cost (example: $10 of Townie spend -> $6.66 to Anthropic, $3.33 to Val Town), decoupled from the Pro subscription. The Free plan includes $1/mo of Townie credit; Pro includes $10/mo; Business $100/mo (confirmed today on docs.val.town/faq and docs.val.town/guides/prompting/townie). A 2026-07-02 changelog states 'Townie 5x cheaper'; 2026-01-22 'Townie v5' runs on Val Town MCP with Claude 4.5 (and newer model list includes Opus 5, GLM, DeepSeek variants). Check spend via the /cost and /context slash commands.
Eligibility
Everyone on the Free plan gets the $1/mo credit automatically; no .edu, no application, no credit card needed for the $1 included amount. Additional AI use is pay-per-use (user pays), so effectively a $1/mo free allowance on top of the $0 hosting tier.
How to claim
Automatic: sign up free, open Townie in the val editor; the $1/mo credit is applied. Top-up/purchase flow for more credits is not documented on the official pages I could reach.
Expiry
$1 credit renews monthly while on the Free plan; pay-per-use has 'no limits' per the 2025 post but costs real money beyond the included credit. Model availability changes over time (Townie v5, 2026 model list).
Gotchas
Trial-vs-free nuance: the $1/mo is a standing free allowance, not a one-time trial. Once it's exhausted, AI calls bill the user at ~1.5x raw LLM cost — a free user hammering Claude Opus can rack up spend. 'No custom domains' and the 1-min run wall clock also constrain what the free AI-built app can do.
No education license and no startup program exist on Val Town as of 2026-10-22: /students, /education, and /startup on val.town all 404; docs.val.town's sitemap (fetched today) contains no pricing/education/student/credit pages; the FAQ and pricing page mention no student/startup discounts; the full blog archive (blog.val.town, fetched today) has zero education/student posts. Nothing was sunset in 2025-2026 that I could find. Material changes that did happen: (1) 2025-06-11 Townie switched to pay-per-use 'Townie Credits' at a 50% markup over raw LLM cost and was decoupled from the Pro plan (previously Townie access came with Pro); (2) 2026-07-02 changelog 'Townie 5x cheaper'; (3) 2026-01-22 Townie v5 (MCP + Claude 4.5) and 2026-01-23 every val gets its own database; (4) Plan pricing: Pro $25/mo ($21/mo yearly), Business $200/mo ($167/mo yearly). Caveat: the session's web-search budget was exhausted, so this absence check relied on the official site's own pages (sitemap, pricing, FAQ, limitations, townie guide, full blog archive) rather than a global search; a niche startup program announced only in social media would not have been caught. WebFetch of val.town/auth/signup was blocked (403), so the no-credit-card-for-free claim rests on the FAQ wording and the pricing page's free-column structure, not direct observation of the form.