I have 5 side projects running right now. Total monthly infrastructure cost: $0. Not "free trial for 12 months" — actually free, indefinitely.
Here's the exact stack and where the bodies are buried.
The stack
| Layer | Service | Free tier limit | My usage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frontend | Vercel | 100GB bandwidth, 6,000 build minutes | 3 projects, ~2GB/mo |
| API/Backend | Cloudflare Workers | 100,000 requests/day | 5 projects, ~15k req/day |
| Database | Neon | 0.5GB storage, 1 compute hour/day | 2 projects, 200MB |
| Auth | Clerk | 10,000 MAU | 3 projects, ~50 MAU |
| Resend | 100 emails/day | 1 project, ~20/day | |
| Total | $0/month |
What I learned the hard way
Neon's compute hour limit is the real constraint. 1 hour/day sounds like a lot until your app gets traction. I had to add aggressive connection pooling (
pool_size=1,max_overflow=0).Vercel's bandwidth limit is generous — 100GB covers a lot of page views. But their function execution limit (100GB-hours) is what actually bites if you have heavy API routes.
Cloudflare Workers is the dark horse. 100k requests/day is more than most side projects ever see. Cold starts are ~0ms. The catch: 10ms CPU time limit per request kills heavy computation.
The one service I had to pay for
Domain names. $12/year per domain. No free tier exists. Everything else: $0.
The controversial part
If you're paying for a VPS to host a side project with <1,000 users, you're doing it wrong. The free tiers are that good now. The only reason to pay is if you need guaranteed uptime SLAs — and side projects don't.
I scaffolded the deployment configs with MonkeyCode — free, open-source, no cloud dependency: https://ly.cyberserval.tech/iIETXiF
What's your side project stack? Still paying for a VPS, or have you gone full free tier?
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