Best free hosting for apps built with AI (2026) | Ample
The short version
For a free full-stack app with a database and no card, Ample's Free plan is the best fit: two apps running, managed databases, a hard cap. Render's free tier spins down after 15 minutes and deletes free Postgres after 30 days; Vercel Hobby and Cloudflare Workers are free for front ends and edge code; Fly.io and Heroku have no free plan.
"Free" means different things on different platforms: a trial that ends, a tier that sleeps, a plan that forbids commercial use, or an allowance that still needs a card. Here is what each platform's own documentation says, checked on October 14, 2026.
Free plans compared
| Platform | What is free | Card needed | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ample | 2 apps running at once, 2 vCPU, 2 GB memory, managed databases, 3 GB volumes, buckets | No | Hard budget of $5 a month; an unclaimed agent account expires after 48 hours |
| Render | Web services with 750 instance hours a month, one Postgres, one Key Value | No | Services spin down after 15 minutes and take about a minute to wake; free Postgres is deleted after 30 days plus 14 days' grace |
| Railway | A 30-day trial with $5 of credit, then $1 of usage a month | No | After the trial: 0.5 GB per service, one project, no custom domain |
| Vercel | Hobby: 4 hours of Active CPU, 1M function invocations, 100 GB transfer a month | Not stated | Personal, non-commercial use only; functions, not servers |
| Netlify | 300 credits a month, functions, a database, Blobs | No | Projects pause when credits run out; functions only |
| Cloudflare Workers | 100,000 requests a day, KV, D1, R2 allowances | No | 10 ms of CPU per request; code must target the Workers runtime; containers need the paid plan |
| Google Cloud Run | 180,000 vCPU-seconds and 2M requests a month | Yes | Databases, storage and domains are separate, paid products |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | Up to 3 static sites | Yes | No free backends |
| Northflank | Developer Sandbox: 2 services, 2 jobs, 1 addon | Yes | Not for production |
| Replit | One published app | No | The app goes down after 30 days; "Made with Replit" badge |
| Lovable | Daily build credits and a small Cloud grant | No | No custom domains, no code download |
| Bolt | Hosting up to 10 GB and 333,333 requests a month | No | JavaScript only; the site stops at the allowance |
| Fly.io | A trial of 2 machine-hours or 7 days | Yes, after the trial | No free tier for new organizations |
| Heroku | Nothing | Yes | Eco dynos start at $5 a month |
Which free plan fits
- A backend with a database, built by a coding agent: Ample. Render works if a one-minute wake and a database that expires after 30 days are acceptable.
- A static site or front end: Vercel Hobby (non-commercial), Netlify or Cloudflare.
- An app you built in Lovable, Replit or Bolt: their own free plans host it with limits; export the code to host it elsewhere when it outgrows them.
Deploy for free on Ample
curl -fsSL https://get.ample.computer/install.sh | sh
ample auth signup
ample plan --write && ample up
No card is needed. Claim the account by email within 48 hours to keep it.