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How to host your side-projects for free in 2023: from Auth to Database

Zevi Reinitz on May 22, 2023

TL;DR In this article, we'll look at how you can host your side project for free in 2023. We'll cover authentication, databases, website...
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Denys Holius •
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AssafKr Livecycle •

Great list! Does anyone know of more useful free-to-use services worth of knowing?

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Dmitry Kharitonov •

Yes, supabase.com - all in one solution

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Baudouin Van Humbeeck •

free-for.dev

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Vineet Pandey •

Yeahh to deploy Kubernetes app, Okteto has a very generous free tier

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JorensM • • Edited

Appwrite.io is a good one too that I'm using for my current project. It has auth, database, storage and cloud functions

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Yshayy Livecycle •

Worked with Upstash in the last few years and had great experience - It's very simple and cost-effective. (also for Kafka workloads)
Neon (neon.tech) might also worth mentioning as it also has a free tier for serverless Postgres.

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Bruno Santos •

Nice article, going to test some of those resources on the upcoming weeks

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Matikiri •

Thanks

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TIM •

Thank you!

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Manu Muraleedharan •

Great list!

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Jane49-cloud •

This is a great one...Thank you

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Prakash Tiwari •

Nice article

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Stefan Neidig •

Worth mentioning:

  • AWS Lambda with function urls (I hosted a complex nanoservice backend this way without spending a dime)
  • MongoDB Atlas (has a Free Tier)
  • AppWrite Cloud. Currently free (not sure if they are out of Beta yet). Might be paid in the future
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Mini256 •

Great post! TiDB serverless database is also worth mentioning here.

I am considering using TiDB Serverless and Vercel Sverless Function to build my application because I learned from their website that it also supports real-time analysis capabilities, so I don't need to introduce another analytical database (such as Clickhouse or Tinybird).

I am also considering using it as the underlying database for my blog (based on a self-hosted wordpress), as it has permanently free 5GB of storage.

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Ivan Jeremic •

Following this Article will literally make you go bankrupt or loose your project sooner or later. Just use WordPress as backend and pay 5$ for Hosting.

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Fox Scarlett •

Speaking as a WP dev w 8 years full time experience, do not even do this. (or, you know, you can pay someone like me to painfully migrate you off it in 2 years like my client did) A good all-around solution for launching an app with various stacks is Render.com

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Ivan Jeremic •

People with knowledge about WP don't need you for a migration.

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Raul Rodriguez •

Cloudinary.com should be added to store images and video for free. Also you can fetch them with resized dimensions

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Ishaan Sheikh •

Fly.io started asking for credit card now.

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Sospeter Mong'are •

Great list

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Orim Dominic Adah •

I used Upstash to build the Twitter bot - PickAtRandom

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Chiamaka Ojiyi •

Great article. Will explore these resources for my projects. What free options do I have if Rabbitmq is a project dependency?

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Fox Scarlett •

Render.com realistically isn't 0$ for a non-sleeping app, but it is very cheap and covers your needs (eg shell access) on various stacks.

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Guruprasad Kulkarni •

If you are looking for graphql and specifically hosted hasura, hasura cloud is a great option but for side projects i would say nhost.io/ is perfect its like backend as a service!