Free compute can cover a small API, a database, an occasional GPU job or even a Linux server. The awkward part is that all four can be advertised as “free hosting” while giving you very different things. Start with what needs to run, then check what happens when the allowance runs out.
This is the maintained shortlist from the monthly free-compute series. The provider documentation linked below was checked on 19 October 2026. These are documentation checks, not a claim to have opened and tested every account. Regional capacity, account eligibility and provider terms still matter.
Which kind of free compute fits the job?
Compare the job, the recurring allowance and what happens at the limit. On a narrow screen, scroll across the table for the billing conditions.
| Job and service | Recurring free allowance | Payment and billing | Main constraint |
|---|---|---|---|
| Linux VM: Oracle Always Free | Up to two AMD micro VMs; Ampere A1: 1,500 OCPU-hours and 9,000 GB-hours/month; 200 GB combined boot/block storage. | Card usually needed for verification; paid upgrade is optional. | Regional capacity is not guaranteed; idle VMs can be reclaimed. |
| Small API or webhook: Cloudflare Workers Free | 100,000 requests/day, 10 ms CPU/request, 128 MB memory. | Free plan; paid usage requires an upgrade. | Worker execution stops at the daily quota until midnight UTC; short CPU budget. |
| Intermittent Postgres: Neon Free | 100 CU-hours/project/month; 1 GB Postgres/project, 20 GB account total; 5 GB transfer/project/month shared across products. | No card; no Free-plan overages. | Sleeps after five idle minutes; compute or transfer exhaustion suspends compute. |
| Managed database: Aiven Free | Free MySQL, PostgreSQL, Kafka, OpenSearch or Valkey service; resource limits vary by service. | No card; no fixed trial expiry. | Inactive services can be powered down; region or configuration can change. |
| Short agent task: Vercel Sandbox Hobby | 5 active CPU-hours, 420 GB-hours memory and 5,000 creations/month. | No Hobby overage charges; personal, non-commercial use. | 45 minutes/session, ten concurrent; quota exhaustion pauses new creation. |
| Burst CPU or GPU jobs: Modal Starter | $30 compute credit/month; hours depend on hardware and workload. | Payment method required; usage beyond credit can be billed. | Set a spend limit; token-billed Shared Endpoints are excluded from the credit. |
| Hosted AI inference: Cloudflare Workers AI | 10,000 Neurons/day; inference volume depends on the model. | Free plan stops at its allocation; Paid can bill additional usage. | Some models require paid billing or prepaid credits; this is an API, not your own GPU. |
A free plan that stops at a limit is easier to budget than a free allowance inside a billable account. A trial credit has an expiry or a finite balance. Shared capacity may be free and still unavailable when you want it. Keep those distinctions attached to the recommendation.
Free VPS hosting: Oracle Cloud Always Free
Oracle's Always Free resource catalogue includes up to two AMD micro VMs and an Ampere A1 allowance of 1,500 OCPU-hours and 9,000 GB-hours each month. Oracle describes the latter as equivalent to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB RAM. The tenancy also has 200 GB of combined boot and block storage.
The catch is capacity in your home region. An advertised allocation is not a reservation, and Oracle can reclaim idle instances. Those constraints make it useful for experiments you can recover, but a poor basis for promising somebody an uninterrupted service for nothing.
If you already own a spare machine, my experience of making a home server useful covers the other route, including why self-hosting everything was not the answer. Electricity and maintenance still count.
Small APIs: Cloudflare Workers
Workers Free includes 100,000 requests per day, 10 milliseconds of CPU time per HTTP request and 128 MB memory. Worker execution stops at the daily request limit until the quota resets at midnight UTC. Fail-closed routes return errors; fail-open routes bypass the Worker.
That is a practical shape for a small API, webhook or bit of application glue. The CPU limit is the important qualification: a high request count does not turn it into a general-purpose VM. Storage and other Cloudflare products have their own allowances; check each resource the application actually uses.
Free databases: Neon and Aiven
Neon's Free plan gives each project 100 CU-hours of compute per month, 1 GB of Postgres storage and 5 GB public network transfer shared with the project's Object Storage and Functions. Postgres storage also has a 20 GB account-wide total. Compute scales to zero after five minutes of inactivity. Exhausting compute or transfer suspends it until the next billing period or an upgrade; the Free plan does not bill overages.
Neon's backend became generally available on 18 September. Free also includes 5 GB of Object Storage per project and monthly Functions allowances of 10 active Capacity-Hours, 400 waiting Capacity-Hours and one million invocations per project. Functions concurrency has separate account-wide limits.
That makes sense for an intermittent Postgres application with a small dataset. It is less comfortable for something that must answer continuously, because the compute budget is finite and sleeping is part of the plan.
Aiven's free services cover MySQL, PostgreSQL, Kafka, OpenSearch and Valkey without a credit card or a fixed trial period. Aiven can power down inactive services and change their region or configuration. Choose the actual database your project needs, then check its individual service limits.
Agent sandboxes: Vercel Sandbox
Vercel Sandbox on Hobby includes five active CPU-hours, 420 GB-hours of provisioned memory and 5,000 creations per month. A single session can run for up to 45 minutes, with ten sandboxes running concurrently. State can persist across stop/resume, but each running session still consumes the allowance. Exceeding the included quota pauses new sandbox creation rather than charging Hobby overages.
Vercel Drives became generally available on 15 October, including Hobby. Hobby includes 15 GB of Drive storage capacity and monthly allowances of 30 GB of reads and 30 GB of writes. Drives preserve a mounted workspace across runs; they do not increase the compute pool. Hobby is for personal, non-commercial use.
CPU-hours and memory-hours are different budgets. Waiting on an API can use little CPU while the allocated memory continues to count. Check both before assuming that a quiet agent can stay running all month.
GPU jobs and hosted AI APIs
Modal's Starter plan includes $30 of compute credit each month. Its CPU, memory and GPU prices determine how much work that buys, so there is no honest single number of “free GPU hours” without specifying the hardware and job. It is a useful option to compare for burst workloads; it is not a permanent GPU reservation. The credit covers Functions, Sandboxes and Notebooks, but excludes token-billed Shared Endpoints, which charge from the first request. Modal requires a payment method and can charge beyond the credit. Set an appropriate Workspace spend limit before leaving jobs running.
Cloudflare Workers AI includes 10,000 Neurons per day. Neurons are Cloudflare's usage unit, and the amount of inference that buys depends on the model. On Workers Free, further operations fail after the allowance is exhausted. Workers Paid can charge for additional usage. Some models require a paid billing method or prepaid AI Gateway credits, so the daily allocation does not make the entire model catalogue available free.
Before building around an allowance
Check whether the plan permits your intended use, whether a card is required, and whether hitting a limit stops work or starts a bill. Then check the less exciting parts: disk, public IP addresses, outbound traffic, idle shutdown and data retention. Keep a backup or an export route for anything you would mind losing.
The monthly editions below contain the broader catalogue and a dated account of changes and corrections. This page stays at the same address as the shortlist changes, so it is the useful one to bookmark or link to.
More free resources for a side project
Once you have somewhere to run it, free APIs for side projects covers useful services to build with, and free assets for side projects covers icons, art, fonts and sound. Check each resource's usage terms alongside the hosting allowance.