Appwrite Cloud's free tier has the usual ceilings — bandwidth, storage, executions. Self-hosted Appwrite has none, and not as a promotional choice: the architecture has no metering layer at all. Auth, databases, storage, functions and realtime all run from one Docker Compose stack on your machine; the only limits are the box's CPU, RAM and disk.
That makes it one of the cleanest "Firebase without the meter" setups: no MAU count to watch, no execution budget, no bandwidth anxiety. The costs move somewhere honest instead — you own backups, TLS, upgrades and uptime.
The sizing reality: the full stack is comfortable on 2 cores / 4 GB, which is well inside a free-tier ARM VM. Pairing a metered-by-nobody backend with hardware billed at $0 is a legitimately production-grade $0/month stack for small apps.
One-command install and the ops checklist: https://toolfreebie.com/appwrite-firebase-alternative/
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