Free plans are how most apps start, and they're genuinely useful. But several come with conditions that only bite once real people turn up: the service goes to sleep, the database pauses, or the terms don't allow a paying business at all. These are the ones in our catalogue.
They pause or sleep when idle
- Supabase Free: projects are paused after a week without activity. Fine for a demo; risky for anything people rely on. Pro projects don't pause.
- Render Free: a free web service spins down after 15 minutes with no traffic. The next visitor waits about a minute while it starts again. Each workspace gets 750 free instance hours a month, and if they run out, free services are suspended until the next month.
They expire or reset
- Render Free Postgres: free databases expire 30 days after they're created, with a 14-day grace period before deletion, and they have no backups.
- Replit Starter: your one published app goes down after 30 days. You can republish it, but it won't stay up on its own.
- Railway: new accounts get a 30-day trial with $5 of credit. After that the free plan is $0 a month with $1 of usage credit, with 0.5 GB of memory per service and no custom domains.
They don't allow commercial use, or don't say
- Vercel Hobby: Vercel's fair-use rules limit Hobby to non-commercial, personal use. A product that takes money needs Pro from day one.
- Netlify and Cloudflare free plans: we couldn't find a clear yes or no on commercial use in their terms. If you're launching something paid, ask them or budget for a paid plan.
What to do about it
- Before launch, list every free plan in your stack and check each against this page.
- Budget for the first paid step on anything that pauses, sleeps or bans commercial use. Our builds show that step in their cost tables.
- Set a reminder for anything with a 30-day clock.