Every year, a free tier that thousands of developers depend on quietly dies. The pattern is always the same: a generous launch, years of "free forever" marketing, then a blog post titled something like "Updating our pricing to serve you better."
I started keeping a list. Here it is — the graveyard, in chronological order.
Heroku — died November 2022. The original free PaaS. Free dynos and free Postgres powered a whole generation of side projects and coding bootcamps. Killed citing fraud and abuse; users were pushed to $5+/mo Eco dynos. The migration wave that followed reshaped the whole indie hosting market.
Railway's unlimited free plan — died August 2023. The $5/mo recurring free credit era ended. Today you get a one-time $5 trial for 30 days, then $1/month of credit — enough to run a real service for a few days. Stateful volumes from trial accounts are deleted 30 days after the trial expires.
PlanetScale — died April 2024. This one hurt: 5 GB of MySQL storage and 1 billion row reads per month, gone — including for existing users. Thousands of production databases had to migrate on a deadline. The lesson everyone learned: even well-funded companies kill free tiers when priorities shift.
Fly.io — died 2024. The free allowances (3 shared VMs, 3 GB volumes) disappeared for new accounts in favor of pure pay-as-you-go.
SendGrid — died 2025. The "free 100 emails/day forever" plan became a 60-day trial. After that: pay or stop sending. A lot of password-reset emails silently stopped going out that month.
Firebase Cloud Storage on Spark — died February 2026. The free 5 GB of file storage now requires the paid Blaze plan. Firestore and Auth survive on the free plan — for now.
What the graveyard teaches
Three patterns show up every time:
Free tiers die when growth slows. They exist to acquire users cheaply. When the company pivots to profitability, the free tier is the first line item under review.
"Free forever" is a marketing phrase, not a contract. No pricing page is legally binding. PlanetScale proved that even existing users aren't safe.
The trap is rarely the headline limit. It's the fine print: databases that pause after a week of inactivity (Supabase), free Postgres that expires after 30 days (Render), sites that stop serving traffic when credits run out (Netlify's new credit model), "no commercial use" clauses (Vercel Hobby).
Why I built a tracker
Because I got tired of finding out about these changes from angry Reddit threads after my stuff broke, I built a small site that tracks developer free tiers — every limit verified by hand against the official pricing page, with a verification date, the traps highlighted, and yes, the graveyard:
https://pitwice.github.io/freetier-radar
It's free, open source, has no sponsors and no affiliate links. A script watches all the pricing pages weekly and flags changes for manual re-verification, so the data doesn't rot.
If you spot an error or want a tool added, open an issue on GitHub — corrections usually ship within a day.
Which free tier do you think dies next? My money is on one of the AI API free tiers.
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