There is exactly one cloud free tier in 2026 that's generous enough to run real production workloads: Oracle Cloud's Always Free ARM VMs — 4 vCPUs and 24 GB of RAM, forever, for $0. Everything else is either a small-but-honest free VM, a free tier with a catch, or a time-limited trial dressed up as a free tier.
We track free tiers across every compute provider on CloudMart. Here's what's actually free in 2026, what the catches are, and what to pick depending on what you're hosting.
The genuinely free, forever tier
| Provider | What you get | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Oracle Cloud | 4 ARM vCPUs + 24 GB RAM (split across up to 4 VMs), plus 2× AMD micro VMs | Capacity in popular regions sells out; idle instances can be reclaimed; sign-up is picky about cards |
| Google Cloud | 1× e2-micro (2 shared vCPU, 1 GB RAM), select US regions | Tiny, but honest — runs a small site or bot fine |
| Render | Free web services + managed Postgres (limits apply) | Spins down after 15 min idle — 30–60s cold start on the next request |
| Vercel | Hobby tier — generous for frontend/static + serverless | Personal projects only per ToS; not for backends |
| Netlify | 100 GB bandwidth, 300 build minutes/mo | Static/JAMstack only |
| Supabase | 2 projects, 500 MB Postgres, auth + storage | Pauses after 1 week of inactivity — fine for dev, not for always-on prod |
Trials pretending to be free tiers
AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, Linode, and Fly.io all offer credits or time-limited trials for new accounts. They're worth taking — but don't architect around them. When the credit runs out, you're on the paid meter. Vultr runs an application-based free tier program, which is real but approval-gated.
The $7-or-less honorable mentions
If "almost free" is acceptable, the paid floor is lower than most people think:
| Provider | Plan | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Fly.io | shared-cpu-1x, 256 MB | $2.02/mo |
| Vultr | 0.5 GB VPS | $2.50/mo |
| Hetzner | CX22 — 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM | $4.90/mo |
| Railway | Hobby ($5 usage included) | $5/mo |
| DigitalOcean | 1 GB Droplet | $6/mo |
| Render | Starter (no spin-down) | $7/mo |
Hetzner's CX22 deserves a callout: 4 GB of RAM for $4.90/mo is more machine than Oracle's free x86 micros and most providers' $12+ tiers. If you can spare five dollars, it removes every free-tier caveat at once.
What to actually pick
- Always-on hobby server (bots, self-hosted apps): Oracle ARM free tier. 24 GB RAM for $0 is unmatched — just snapshot regularly in case of reclaim.
- Personal site / portfolio: Vercel or Netlify free. Static hosting is a solved, free problem.
- Prototype with a database: Render free + Supabase free. Accept the cold starts; upgrade to Render Starter ($7) when they annoy you.
- Tiny API that must respond instantly: Fly.io at $2.02/mo or GCP's free e2-micro.
- Anything you'd call "production": skip free tiers entirely — Hetzner CX22 at $4.90 or DigitalOcean at $6 buys you out of every asterisk on this page.
Want the free-tier-first version of your stack?
Tell the Planner your budget is $0 — it builds the cheapest viable stack and tells you what the trade-offs are.
Plan a $0 stack →Related: the cheapest paid VPS compared — for when you've outgrown the asterisks.