5 PaaS Platforms With a \u00240 Hobby Tier That's Actually Free, Not a Trial (2026)

Vercel offers the most feature-rich free tier in the PaaS space — and it's not close. The Hobby plan includes automatic CI/CD from Git, a global CDN with automatic HTTPS, a Web Application Firewall, DDoS mitigation, 1M edge requests/month, 100GB bandwidth, serverless functions (1M invocations/month), and even Blob storage and Web Analytics. For a Next.js or React project, this is everything you need to run a production-quality side project at zero cost.

The Vercel Hobby tier is purpose-built for frontend and serverless workloads. If your side project is a Next.js app, a React dashboard, a marketing site, or an API built with serverless functions, Vercel's free tier handles it with room to spare. The build pipeline connects to GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket — push to main and your app deploys automatically. Preview deployments generate unique URLs for every PR, making it easy to share work-in-progress without affecting production.

The limitations are clear: serverless functions have a 10-second execution limit on Hobby (enough for API routes, not for heavy processing), there are no persistent background workers, and WebSocket connections aren't supported. You can't run a traditional Node.js server, a queue worker, or a long-running process. For frontend-first projects, these limits rarely matter. For full-stack apps that need a backend server, look at Render.

Render fills the gap that Vercel's free tier leaves: backend servers. The free plan includes web services with 750 hours/month of compute — enough to run a Node.js API, a Python Flask app, or a Ruby on Rails backend 24/7 (with sleep after inactivity). Combined with static site hosting, automatic HTTPS, auto-deploy from Git, and a free PostgreSQL database (90 days), Render's free tier can host a complete full-stack application.

For side projects that need a real backend — an API server, a webhook handler, a bot, a small SaaS MVP — Render is the most practical free option. The 750 hours/month of free web service compute means your app can run continuously for most of the month. The catch is spin-down: free tier services sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity and take 10-30 seconds to cold-start when a request arrives. For a portfolio project or personal tool, this is acceptable. For anything latency-sensitive, it's a deal-breaker.

The free PostgreSQL database is a genuine differentiator — most free PaaS tiers don't include databases. The 90-day expiration means it's a prototyping tool, not permanent storage, but it's enough time to validate an idea. Render's dashboard is clean and simple compared to cloud providers, making it accessible for developers who don't want to manage Kubernetes or Docker orchestration.

Netlify pioneered the JAMstack deployment model and its free tier remains the gold standard for static sites and serverless functions. 100GB bandwidth, 300 build minutes, serverless functions, deploy previews, instant rollbacks, and free HTTPS — all at zero cost with no credit card required. For documentation sites, portfolio pages, blogs, and marketing landing pages, Netlify's free tier is more generous than what many platforms charge money for.

The deploy preview feature is Netlify's standout for developer productivity on the free tier. Every pull request generates a unique preview URL with the exact state of that branch — share it with collaborators, test on mobile, verify changes before merging. Combined with instant rollbacks (click a button to revert to any previous deploy), the free tier provides a production-grade deployment workflow that eliminates "it works on my machine" entirely.

Netlify Functions (serverless) on the free tier handle up to 125K invocations/month with 100 hours of compute — sufficient for contact forms, API proxies, auth handlers, and light backend logic. The Forms feature captures form submissions without any backend code, which is particularly useful for static sites that need a contact form. Edge Functions run at the CDN edge for ultra-fast responses. The ecosystem of build plugins extends functionality without custom code.

Coolify is the only platform on this list with a truly unlimited free tier — but the catch is that you provide the server. Coolify is an open-source, self-hosted PaaS that gives you Heroku/Vercel-like deployment workflows on your own infrastructure. Install it on a \u00245/month VPS (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr) and you get unlimited deployments, unlimited projects, automatic HTTPS via Let's Encrypt, Docker-based builds, Git-based CI/CD, and a management dashboard — all at the cost of the VPS, not the platform.

For developers who want true ownership and no platform limits, Coolify removes every restriction that makes other free tiers frustrating. No cold starts (your app runs 24/7 on your server), no bandwidth caps, no build minute limits, no serverless execution time restrictions. Deploy any Docker container, any language, any framework. Run databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB) alongside your app on the same server. Host 10 side projects on one \u00245 VPS.

The trade-off is DevOps responsibility. You manage the server: OS updates, security patches, disk space, backups, and uptime monitoring. Coolify automates the deployment workflow but not the infrastructure management. For developers comfortable with basic Linux server administration, this is the most cost-effective way to host side projects. For developers who want zero ops, Vercel or Render's managed free tiers are simpler.

Railway makes this list with an important caveat: its free offering is a one-time \u00245 trial credit, not a permanent free tier. We include it because Railway's developer experience is so good that it deserves mention even with this limitation — and for many developers, the \u00245/month Hobby plan that follows is worth every penny.

What sets Railway apart is deployment simplicity. Connect a GitHub repo, and Railway auto-detects your framework, builds the project, provisions infrastructure (including databases), and deploys — often with zero configuration. Need a PostgreSQL database? Click one button. Need Redis? Same. Need a cron job? Add a Procfile entry. The developer experience is what Heroku was at its peak, but faster and cheaper.

The \u00245/month Hobby plan includes \u00245 in usage credits — enough to run a small app with a database 24/7. There are no cold starts on paid plans, persistent volumes for database storage, and support for any Docker container. For developers whose side projects outgrow free tiers quickly, Railway's pay-for-what-you-use model at \u00245/month base is often cheaper than accidentally exceeding limits on "free" platforms and getting surprise bills.