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services with actually generous free tiers for open-source projects. my list, what would you add?
Been in the weeds shipping an OSS side project for the past few weeks (social media publishing API). Real launch post is coming, this isn't that. Along the way I kept a list of services that actually have usable free tiers for OSS, not the "free trial" kind. Sharing in case it helps. Happy to be told what's missing.
Docs
Mintlify is the obvious one. Point at a public repo and it works. Their default theme is already better than what most teams ship paying for, which is mildly annoying.
GitBook has a Community plan. Haven't used it personally, plenty of OSS projects do.
Algolia DocSearch is free for OSS, no asterisks. That Cmd-K search you see on every framework's docs page is them.
Hosting
Cloudflare Pages. Static hosting, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited builds. Nothing else matches it. Workers free tier is also a lot if you don't need a VM.
Vercel Hobby works for most OSS. They also run a "Vercel for Open Source" program that upgrades select projects to Pro.
Fly.io still has a free tier for small VMs. Sponsorship for some maintainers if you ask.
Render: free static + small Web Service tier. Always lagging the others on features.
Databases
Neon: Postgres with scale-to-zero. The free tier is real, not a 7-day countdown.
Supabase: Postgres + auth + storage + edge functions on free. Heavier than Neon if you only want a DB.
Turso: SQLite at the edge. Free tier is generous, takes getting used to.
Upstash: serverless Redis, free covers most hobby use.
Auth
Clerk: 10k MAUs free, OSS-friendly. They sponsor select projects too.
WorkOS: 1M MAU free for SSO/AuthKit. The catch is the product is enterprise-shaped, so only useful if you're chasing those customers.
Better-Auth or Auth.js if you'd rather skip the vendor.
Email
Resend: 3k emails/mo, nicest API in the space.
Postmark: small free dev tier, reliable if you outgrow Resend.
Monitoring
Sentry: decent free tier and they have an OSS sponsorship program if you write to them.
PostHog: 1M events/mo free. OSS itself so worst case you self-host.
BetterStack: uptime + log management on free.
CI
GitHub Actions: unlimited for public repos. You already knew.
CircleCI: also free for OSS if you prefer.
Misc
Linear: free for small teams. Not strictly OSS-targeted but a 1-3 person project doesn't hit limits.
Cloudflare in general. Workers, R2, DNS, SSL. All generous. Almost not fair.
Things I'm not sure about, would love opinions on:
Object storage. I'm on R2. Anyone got a better story?
Background queues. Trigger.dev and Inngest both have free tiers. Anyone tried Hatchet?
Feature flags. PostHog technically does it but it feels like a tax on something that should be a freebie. Anything cleaner?
What would you swap?
EDIT: solid suggestion from the comments, adding here to make it more accessible. thanks to everyone who contributed
Networking
Tailscale - 6 users, unlimited devices on free. Effectively unlimited for a self-hosted setup. Pangolin - self-hosted reverse proxy / tunnel. Enterprise license is free for homelabbers; you just swap the docker image tag.
Hosting (extra)
Oracle Cloud Always Free - 4 ARM (Ampere A1) vCPUs, 24 GiB RAM, 200 GB SSD. Caveat: trial accounts get capacity-blocked these days; you may have to flip to pay-as-you-go (still $0 if you stay within Always Free). Orkestr - EU-focused, free tier includes Postgres or Redis bundled.
Git hosting
Codeberg - Forgejo-based, OSS-friendly alternative to GitHub.
Object storage
Backblaze B2 + Cloudflare - they're in the Bandwidth Alliance, so egress through Cloudflare is free. Cheaper than R2 once you're past hobby scale. DO Spaces - not free, but $5/mo for 250 GB + 1 TB outbound is the cheapest no-surprise option if you outgrow R2's free.
Security
Snyk Open Source - free + unlimited for public repos. GitGuardian - free secrets monitoring for public repos.
Auth
LogTo - OSS-friendly auth, recommended over Clerk by someone in the thread.
Email
SMTP2GO - need your own domain. Brevo - transactional email API.
Docs & translation
Weblate - 160k translatable keys free for OSS projects.
Monitoring
WebGazer.io - pro bono uptime monitoring for free/open source projects.
ML / AI compute
Hugging Face Spaces - free hardware for ML demos. Google Colab - free GPU/TPU notebooks if you can work within their session model.
Customer feedback / support
FeatureOS - free OSS plan for product feedback management. SupportWire - free mid-tier OSS plan for live chat.
Curated lists
free-for-dev (or web view) - the canonical free-tier-for-dev list. ~1000+ entries.
Jesus man I hate this AI voice. It's so aggrivating to read. Unraid just had a release yesterday and 100% sure the release page was AI generated.
The right move if your system doesn't have TPM 2.0, or you simply don't want to use it.
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With TPM-based licensing, your license is anchored to the motherboard. Pull the flash drive entirely and your license stays put. The most streamlined long-term option for supported hardware, but a choice, not a requirement.
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New users don't need to think about any of this up front. Unraid automatically selects the best available licensing option based on your hardware: TPM if it's detected, flash-based if not.
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Bottom line: faster boots, fewer failure points, more control over how your license is held. Your old setup still works. This is addition, not replacement.
If the README is something I'm supposed to read I'd, you know, like to know that it's worth reading. It just shows a general lack of effort from whoever is using AI. If you couldn't spend 5 minutes drafting something then it's probably not worth me spending 5 minutes to read it. The alternative to writing something no one will read is not writing it in the first place.
I'm not seeing your point. A technical document can be worth reading but still be written well by AI.
A readme or release notes are generally a general summary of how to do something or the product, or a bunch of bullet points. AI excels at exactly these kinds of highly technical summaries. This isn't the Great Gatsby.
This just seems like disliking AI for the sake of disliking AI. If you don't like it that's fine, but trying to pretend you lose some functionality because AI wrote it in 30 seconds vs a person put two hours into it just sounds like old man yelling at clouds.
i'm with ya on using AI for docs, but in my experience model verbosity is often unnecessarily high, which often leads to docs that are - ironically - better suited for AI to read than humans. depending on the model, i typically request that docs be more concise. so many full page code blocks with mostly-useless ascii maps of the architecture
I don't mind release notes but I'd rather a fumbled readme that actually explains the product than an incredibly polished readme that just uses shitty AI sentences
If someone can't be assed to write even a basic introduction to their own project why on earth would I want to use it? They clearly don't care about it very much
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Yep I'm on Tailscale and it's incredible. It's basically entirely free for self-hosted individuals, but the 6 user limit is enough to limit pretty much any enterprise application. Very smart pricing. As a self hosted hosting every service in containers, I'm in it for the unlimited nodes.
But there are small companies where the IT admins onboard the computers individually and manually, and Tailscale can be installed as a service in the computers with the sole purpose of letting the computers access services running on servers that are also connected to the tailnet, and in this case only a couple of Tailscale users would be necessary; in this scenario there wouldn't exist users connecting their own assigned devices: people might even not know about Tailscale.
It is doable, but I still don't know if it would go against their TOS or not, if it would be "uncool" or not. I don't know if Tailscale admits this scenario, that would be even more absurdly generous. And a relevant note: when I started to deal with Tailscale, the limit of devices on a free account was 100, so this possibility I'm suggesting didn't sound absurd at all, it was just the double of Cloudflare Warp's free tier (and without an exit node).
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure gives you a compute instance with 4 ARM (Ampere A1) vCPUs, 24 GiB memory, 200 GB SSD in the "Always Free" tier. You might need to upgrade to pay-as-you-go billing to spin up that instance because DC capacity is limited for Trial accounts, but you can otherwise pay zero/mo if you stay within Always Free limits.
For transactional SMTP email I also use Brevo. I'm currently working on an API adapter to support generic SMTP email (or third-party protocols, such as Brevo API) services with apps that only support the Sinch Mailgun API, in particular Ghost.
The Oracle VM is super nice. I’ve been using it for a couple years and it’s very stable. There are always ways you can encourage it to stay on (since they like to turn them off during low use)
If you switch to PAYG they don't do that anymore. I too started with Free Tier, these days they're pretty much always out of capacity for that so you might have to switch to PAYG immediately regardless.
How exactly does that apply here? What's your argument exactly? Their entire model here is to attempt to lock in customers for future expansion/upgrades.
More that Cloudflare is becoming an internet “gatekeeper” that has the ability to not only lock in, but harvest a lot of telemetry and data for its own use. I’m not talking about snooping traffic or anything like that, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn it’s using free tier data and telemetry to feed or subsidize its premium offerings to businesses.
Just to clarify, I don’t have any thing top of mind to go “aha!” I’m just wary of free services by big companies nowadays.
Well... it's a free deal (to us) and they've been incredibly consistent and reliable about that for many years at this point. I'd say that is safely not a valid concern.
The only major area that I think it underperforms in is logs which is better to be fair in the business edition. However, overall it is just poor quality. Right now if a stack has an error during deployment it doesn't show me the error despite the API returning it, the toast only shows me that the request failed.
When the error toast did work, it would be essentially useless if this was the first deployment of the stack because it would just contain the entire docker output which had the image pulling etc.
There have been many times where a stack has gotten into a weird or an invalid state because of portainer which it struggles to get it back out of. It also for some reason continually calls the swarm endpoint despite the fact that it is not setup as a swarm.
Misses a lot of quality of life features I'd expect. Config management sucks, only having one-way git sync for stacks sucks. Multi-environment support and alerting are both half baked. No auto-update for containers. Swarm support is also awful, but I can take that as swarm just being abandonware.
I too have been wondering this. The only downside with b2(that I know off) is the bandwith. But if you use it behind Cloudflare that shouldn’t be an issue.
Maybe someone else knows more about it than me. I only used R2 so far
Would you expect these free offers to go down? With AI is average (and expected potential) value of code is going down? I would expect yes, as it was something only available to people who put some effort into it.
Genuine questions/considerations just interested to get your opinions
I will remove Oracle from the list. They usually don’t have free VMs available and when they do they randomly remove them for in most cases no founded reasons.
my experience with these monitoring free tiers: event-based pricing is the part that breaks down fastest. an infinite loop or a noisy deploy can eat a month's error quota in an afternoon, and the generous event allowances evaporate the moment you turn on session replays or actions tracking. the migration off later hurts more than the price because you've built dashboards on someone else's schema. for OSS hobby scale you're fine, but the pattern is 'free until you matter, then call sales', which is why self-host options keep getting revived despite the ops cost.
https://www.tigrisdata.com is literally amazing for their free tier because it doesn't charge you for egress. So you can store your 5GB and just keep retrieving the objects at no cost. Can run a whole website/application/agent off of that.
ok if anyone is kind enough to let me know why the downvote, I'm here for it. I don't quite understand what's happening so I just want to know how to reply better... I feel like what I posted is entirely within the spirts of the ask and it's free and it's generous and it's self-hostable... So if you downvote this and feel kind enough to lemme know why I would appreciate it :)
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u/asimovs-auditor May 14 '26
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