Free Vercel and Heroku alternatives

Free alternatives to Vercel and to Heroku aren’t the same list, because people leave each one for a different reason. You leave Vercel because its Hobby plan only allows personal, non-commercial use; you leave Heroku because it has had no free dynos since 28 November 2022. The first usually calls for another frontend-and-functions platform; the second, for one that runs a real server, on the understanding that it will sleep.

This list sorts the options by the kind of project you have. Each plan’s limits live on its page in the directory, because they change often and would go stale here.

Why people leave each one

Vercel still has a free plan, and it’s excellent for a Next.js or Astro site. The problem is in its terms: the Hobby plan is restricted to personal, non-commercial use. A project that takes payments, belongs to a client or promotes a business doesn’t fit there, even if it technically runs. We go into it in the free-plan limits nobody reads.

Heroku was for years the default place to deploy a Node, Python or Ruby app without paying. On 28 November 2022 it withdrew free dynos, free Postgres and free Redis. Every plan is paid today, and many of the guides still recommending it as a free option predate that change.

1. Netlify, for what you had on Vercel

Netlify is the most direct Vercel alternative: deploys from Git, per-branch previews, a custom domain with HTTPS, and serverless functions. Its Free plan runs on a monthly credit limit consumed by production deploys, bandwidth, requests and functions; previews cost nothing. When the credits run out, Netlify pauses the projects.

Before moving a commercial project, read its terms of use just as you read Vercel’s: the pricing page doesn’t settle it, and that is the very point that sent you looking.

2. Cloudflare Pages and Workers, for static sites and the edge

Cloudflare Pages publishes static sites with a monthly build limit, and according to its docs requests to static assets are free and unlimited on every plan. Server logic goes in Pages Functions, which count against the Workers quota: a daily request allowance and a short CPU time per invocation.

It’s the option that best survives a traffic spike on a static site without paying. In exchange, the runtime isn’t full Node, and a project built around the Next.js server may need an adapter.

3. Render, for what you had on Heroku

Render is the closest thing to the old free Heroku: connect a repository or a Dockerfile and it runs a web service in any language, with Postgres available. If your app is an Express server or similar, it’s the simplest free Node hosting there is.

The trade-off is documented: free services spin down after a few minutes without traffic and take around a minute to come back, the free database expires after a while, and workers and cron jobs have no free instance type. Render explicitly asks you not to use it for production.

4. Deno Deploy, if you can rewrite in TypeScript

Deno Deploy has a Free plan for personal use and smaller projects. It won’t run your Heroku app as is, but if the backend is a handful of endpoints, porting them to Deno is usually an afternoon, and in return there’s no server to fall asleep.

5. Railway and Fly.io: careful, they aren’t free the way they were

They show up on almost every list of Heroku alternatives, so it’s worth knowing where they stand today:

• Railway starts with a trial and then moves you to a Free plan with a small monthly credit. Enough to try things out, not to keep a service running all month.
• Fly.io offers new organisations no free tier and no monthly free allowance: there’s a short trial, after which you add a card.

Both are good paid platforms. They just aren’t a way to deploy without paying.

What to check before you move

Switching platforms is cheap if the project doesn’t lean on anything specific to the old one. Before moving anything:

• Take the port and configuration from environment variables, not hard-coded values. It’s what nearly every platform expects.
• List what you use from the current platform: edge functions, middleware, image optimisation, cron. Every proprietary piece is a migration task.
• Move the database out if it lived with the same provider. A standalone managed Postgres — we compare options in free-tier databases — outlasts every hosting change to come.
• Point your own domain, not the platform’s subdomain, so moving doesn’t break links.

If the project also needs a backend separate from the frontend, the options by kind of API are in free backend hosting, and the remaining pieces in a free stack to launch a project. The whole category is in hosting and deploy.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use Vercel for free on a commercial project? Not on the Hobby plan: its terms restrict it to personal, non-commercial use. For a commercial project you need a paid plan or a different platform whose terms allow it.

What’s the best free alternative to Heroku? For an app that is a Node, Python or Ruby server, Render is the closest match: deploys from Git, any language, and Postgres. The difference is that the free service sleeps without traffic and takes a while to wake up.

When did Heroku stop being free? On 28 November 2022. That day it withdrew free dynos, free Postgres and free Redis, and began shutting down the free resources still running.

Where can I host a Node app for free without it sleeping? If you can write it as functions, on Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy or Netlify functions, which run per request instead of keeping a server up. A classic always-on Node server is exactly what free plans rarely give you any more.

Are the limits mentioned here still current? Free plans change several times a year. Before deciding, check the provider’s official pricing page, which is the one that counts; the directory pages link to it and say when they were last reviewed.