238 tools · 9 categories · checked 28 Sept 2026

Which VPS should you use?

Developer and cloud tools compared on what they actually cost: plans and free-tier limits read from each vendor’s own pricing page, dated and sourced. Pick your stage to start.

§01

Browse by category

238 tools, A to Z, never paid placement
01

VPS and cloud servers

Virtual servers by the hour or month, from €4 boxes to hyperscaler instances, compared on real specs and transfer.

25 tools paid from ~$2.00/mo
02

App hosting and PaaS

Platforms that build and run your code from git: frontend hosts, container platforms and serverless runtimes.

27 tools paid from ~$1.94/mo
03

Managed databases

Hosted Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis and serverless databases, compared on free tiers, branching and scale-to-zero.

31 tools paid from ~$5.00/mo
04

Transactional email APIs

APIs and SMTP relays for password resets, receipts and notifications, with prices at real sending volumes.

30 tools paid from ~$4.00/mo
05

Email marketing and newsletters

Newsletter and email marketing platforms for products and creators, priced by contacts, with free plans compared.

32 tools paid from ~$7.00/mo
06

Domain registrars

Where to register a domain, compared on the .com renewal price, not the first-year promotion.

27 tools paid from ~$0.50/mo
07

CDN, DNS and edge security

Content delivery networks, managed DNS and web application firewalls, compared on free plans and bandwidth prices.

32 tools paid from ~$0.20/mo
08

Monitoring, uptime and error tracking

Uptime checks, error tracking, logs, APM and status pages, with free allowances and data retention compared.

28 tools paid from ~$1.00/mo
09

Auth and identity

Hosted and open-source authentication: sign-in, social login, MFA and enterprise SSO, priced by monthly active users.

32 tools paid from ~$15/mo

Or search all 238 in the directory →

§02

Free tiers worth knowing

137 tools have one

A permanent free tier in every category, with its real limits. The full comparison is on the free tiers page.

Category Tool What is free
VPS Always Free: two VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro instances (1/8 OCPU, 1 GB RAM, 50 Mbps), Ampere A1 Arm capacity of 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month (2 OCPUs and 12 GB RAM), and 200 GB of block volume storage, all in your home region. Idle instances may be reclaimed.
PaaS
Cloudflare Workers (incl. Pages) workers.cloudflare.com
100,000 Worker requests per day, 10 ms CPU per invocation, 100 Workers, 5 cron triggers; static asset requests are free and unlimited; no egress charges.
Databases
Neon neon.com
100 projects, 100 CU-hours of compute per project per month, autoscaling up to 2 CU, 0.5 GB storage per project, 5 GB egress, 10 branches per project, 6-hour restore window, up to 60,000 auth MAU; compute suspends when a limit is hit
Transactional email
Resend resend.com
3,000 emails a month, capped at 100 a day, 3 domains, 30-day data retention
Email marketing
Kit kit.com
Up to 10,000 subscribers, unlimited landing pages, forms and broadcasts, tagging and segmentation, selling digital products; Kit branding and no sequences or visual automations beyond a basic one
CDN and DNS
Cloudflare cloudflare.com
Free plan: DNS, CDN, universal SSL, unmetered DDoS protection and the free managed WAF ruleset, with no bandwidth charge; no SLA.
Monitoring
UptimeRobot uptimerobot.com
50 monitors at 5-minute intervals: HTTP, port, ping, keyword, API, UDP, DNS and SSL/domain expiry checks, 1 basic status page, up to 5 integrations, no team login seats. Commercial use allowed.
Auth
Clerk clerk.com
Hobby plan: 50,000 monthly retained users per app, unlimited apps, up to 3 social connections, 3 dashboard seats; no MFA, passkeys or branding removal

Compare every free tier →

§03

Recent and upcoming price changes

Free tiers shrink and prices move. We log each change with its date and source.

  • .com wholesale fee rises to $10.97

    Cloudflare Registrar · Verisign announced on 2026-04-23 that the .com wholesale fee rises from $10.26 to $10.97 effective 2026-11-01. Cloudflare Registrar charges the registry price plus ICANN fee with no markup, so its .com price ($10.46 before) follows the new fee.

  • .com price to rise to about $11.81

    Porkbun · Porkbun's knowledge base says its .com price will rise on 2026-11-01 at 04:00 UTC to approximately $11.81, from $11.08, after Verisign's wholesale increase (effective date).

  • Price increase on 226 Identity Digital extensions

    Namecheap · Namecheap announced higher registration, renewal and transfer prices on 226 Identity Digital TLDs effective 2026-10-06; for example .email renewal goes from $40.98 to $45.98 (effective date).

  • Cockroach Continuum replaces Basic, Standard and Advanced for new organisations

    CockroachDB Cloud (Cockroach Continuum) · Effective 2026-09-15: new cloud organisations get Standard ($0.092/vCPU-hr in us-east-1) and Mission Critical ($0.162/vCPU-hr) editions and a 30-day, $400 trial; the new pricing page lists no free Basic plan. Existing customers keep their plans.

  • Remote Config fetches become billable

    Firebase · Effective 2026-09-01: on the Blaze plan, 100,000 fetches a day per project are free, then $0.06 per 10,000 requests. They were previously listed at no cost.

  • New Amazon SES accounts default to the Essentials plan

    Amazon SES · From July 21, 2026 (effective date), new SES accounts and account-region pairs with no SES use since June 1, 2025 start on the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000 emails instead of a la carte pricing at $0.10 per 1,000; customers can switch to a la carte at any time.

The full change log →

§04

How this site works

Sourced and dated

Every price comes from the vendor’s own pricing page, shows the date we read it, and links to it. No price without a source.

Never for sale

Tables are A to Z and picks are editorial. Some links earn a commission; they never change an order or a pick.

By stage

What suits a weekend project rarely suits a company. Every tool is tagged from hobby to enterprise.

Methods and independence policy →