A free stack to launch a project

You can put a web project on the internet without paying anything, and we don’t mean a demo: we mean something with a domain, a database, user accounts, email that arrives and alerts when it breaks. It takes six pieces, all of them have genuinely free options, and the work lies in choosing them so that you can swap any one out later without rebuilding the project.

Here is the list, in the order you assemble it. Each service’s concrete limits are on its page in the directory, because they change often and would go stale here.

1. Hosting and deployment

The first decision and the easiest to change. Any modern platform deploys from a Git repository with an HTTPS certificate included and no server to touch.

What to check in the free plan, in this order: whether it allows commercial use — Vercel’s Hobby tier does not, and it is the most common stumble — how much bandwidth is included, and whether build minutes are capped. Alternatives with different trade-offs: Netlify, Render or Cloudflare.

Practical advice: don’t use platform-specific features until the project justifies it. As long as you stay on the standard path, moving takes an afternoon. The whole category is in hosting and deploy.

2. Database

The hardest piece to change later, so it deserves the most thought. For nearly everything, managed Postgres: it is the most portable standard there is.

What decides it here isn’t storage, it is whether the database pauses on inactivity, how many projects the plan includes and how many concurrent connections it handles. Supabase adds authentication and storage on top of Postgres; Neon bets on database branching, handy if you work with pull requests. We go into it in free-tier databases.

3. Authentication

You could write it yourself, and it is almost always a bad idea: between password resets, email verification, sessions, tokens and external providers, a month disappears into something that differentiates your product not at all.

In the free plan, check how many active users are included and what is excluded: signing in with Google is usually there; enterprise SSO almost never is. Options with a generous free tier: Clerk, Auth0, or the authentication that already comes with Supabase if you are using it anyway. More in auth and users.

4. Transactional email

The message that confirms an account or resets a password does not go out from your own server: it lands in spam. You need a provider with sending reputation.

What counts here is how many emails per day and per month the free plan covers — the daily cap is usually the one that bites — and whether you may use your own domain, because sending from someone else’s hurts deliverability. Resend, Brevo and Mailjet cover the early stage well. For serverless forms, Formspree or Tally save you building anything. Full category in email and forms.

5. Analytics

Not to stare at a pretty dashboard, but to answer one concrete question: are people doing what you thought they would?

For a developer-facing product, cookieless analytics that spares you a consent banner is worth a lot: less friction and less legal work. Umami and Cloudflare Web Analytics go that way; PostHog adds product events and session replay if you need more depth. In the free plan, check the monthly event cap and retention. More in analytics.

6. Errors and uptime

The piece everyone leaves for later and always regrets. Without it, you learn the project is down because somebody messages you.

They are two different things: error tracking, to know which exception was thrown and with what data — Sentry is the reference — and uptime monitoring, to know whether the site responds, with UptimeRobot or Better Stack. What to check in the free plan is retention: keeping errors for a few days is fine for developing, not for operating. Category in monitoring.

The one thing you shouldn’t get for free

The domain. It costs little per year and it is the only thing on this list that is genuinely yours. A subdomain of whichever platform you’re on means that the day you move, you lose the links, the search ranking and whatever trust you built.

Buy the domain on day one, point it where it needs to go, and from then on you can change hosting, database and email provider without anyone noticing.

How not to get stuck

Three rules that cost nothing while the project is small and save weeks later:

• Standards before proprietary APIs when the difference is small: Postgres, S3, OpenTelemetry.
• Test each service’s export on day one, with the project empty.
• A thin layer between your logic and the provider’s SDK, even if it is four functions.

With that, switching providers costs hours. Without it, it costs a quarter. The seven limits worth reviewing in every service are in the free-plan limits nobody reads.

Frequently asked questions

Can you really launch a project without paying anything? Without paying anything except the domain, yes, and it is the normal way to validate an idea today. The question isn’t whether you can, but how long it holds: as traffic grows, the first piece that forces a payment is usually the database or the email, well before the hosting.

Which piece is worth paying for first as the project grows? Almost always the one that breaks something visible to the user when it runs out: email, if you send account confirmations, and the database, if it pauses or gets suspended. Analytics and error tracking tolerate a tight plan far better.

Should I mix providers or use one platform that does everything? Both work. An integrated platform saves time early and ties you down more; mixing gives freedom and adds accounts to maintain. For a solo project, an integrated platform at first and separate pieces once something specific falls short is usually the best balance.

Does a free plan let me use my own domain? Nearly always in hosting, not always in email or analytics. It is one of the most overlooked restrictions and worth checking up front, because in email it directly affects whether your messages arrive.

How do I know the limits I’m reading are still current? You don’t: free plans change without notice, several times a year. That is why every entry in the directory states when it was reviewed and links to the official pricing page, which is the only source that counts.