You are a founder trying to build a lean MVP: This Free Tier list is your secret weapon

You know that feeling when you start a side project and spend 2 hours Googling 'free PostgreSQL hosting' only to find services that were free 3 years ago? Or you sign up for a 'free tier' that expires in 14 days. Cloud providers bury their free offerings in pricing pages, and what was free last quarter might cost $50/month now. You waste more time hunting for free tiers than building.

Think of it as a community-maintained catalog, not a search engine. You browse by category — 'Managed Data Services' or 'CI and CD' — and see every service with a verified free tier. Each entry lists exactly what you get free: '1 non-preemptible e2-micro, 30GB HDD' for Google Compute, or '2 million invocations per month' for Cloudflare Workers. The maintainer enforces rules: no trials masquerading as free tiers, no services that gate TLS behind paywalls, and everything must be SaaS/PaaS/IaaS (no self-hosted software).

• 50+ categories — covers everything from major cloud providers to DNS, monitoring, email, and generative AI. You find free tiers you didn't know existed.
• Strict eligibility rules — free tier must last at least a year, not just 14-day trials. No TLS-gated services. Saves you from bait-and-switch pricing.
• 1,600+ contributors — the community catches pricing changes fast. When a service kills its free tier, someone files a PR within days.
• Opinionated scope — focused on infrastructure/DevOps tools, not consumer apps. You won't wade through irrelevant noise.
• Major cloud provider breakdowns — AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, IBM all itemized with exact free tier limits. One page replaces 5 browser tabs.
• Security-conscious curation — services that restrict TLS to paid tiers are excluded. You won't get locked into insecure free tiers.

Who It Is For

If you're a backend engineer, DevOps practitioner, or solo founder building side projects without a budget, this is your reference sheet. It's built for infrastructure-focused developers who need free compute, storage, monitoring, and tooling. Not for you if you're looking for self-hosted alternatives (see awesome-selfhosted instead) or consumer-facing free services.

Worth Exploring?

Yes — bookmark it now. With 120k stars and 11 years of active maintenance (last commit April 3, 2026), this isn't another abandoned 'awesome list.' The strict curation rules and security requirements make it genuinely useful, not just a link dump. One caveat: always verify the free tier directly with the provider before building on it, since pricing changes faster than PRs get merged.