Stage 1 of 5 · $0–10/mo
The hobby stack
Side projects, learning and demos. Free tiers first; nothing that bills by surprise.
§1
One pick per job
editorial, never paid| Job | Our pick | Why | From | Also consider |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VPS | Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute Free tier | The Always Free tier includes Arm capacity (2 OCPU, 12 GB RAM) and two micro VMs, if your region has capacity. | $0 | Google Compute Engine , BuyVM KVM Slices , RackNerd KVM VPS |
| PaaS | Cloudflare Workers (incl. Pages) Free tier | 100,000 requests a day free, no cold starts, with D1, KV and static assets on the same account. | $5/mo | GitHub Pages , Northflank , Dokploy |
| Databases | Neon Free tier | Free Postgres with 100 projects, scale to zero after 5 minutes and copy-on-write branches. | Usage-based | Aiven , Cloudflare D1 , Redis Cloud |
| Transactional email | Resend Free tier | 3,000 emails a month free (100 a day), a clean API and inbound on every plan. | $20/mo | MailerSend , Brevo , Mailjet |
| Email marketing | Kit Free tier | Free up to 10,000 subscribers, with unlimited landing pages, forms and broadcasts. | $33/mo | Sender , Brevo , EmailOctopus |
| Registrars | Porkbun Paid | The same .com price in year one and at renewal, free WHOIS privacy and a DNSSEC toggle. | $11.08/yr | Hostinger Domains , DNSimple , Spaceship |
| CDN and DNS | Cloudflare Free tier | Free DNS, CDN, SSL and DDoS protection, with bandwidth not metered. | $20/mo | deSEC , Hetzner DNS , Hurricane Electric Free DNS |
| Monitoring | UptimeRobot Free tier | 50 monitors at 5-minute intervals and a status page, free. | $11/mo | Coroot , New Relic , GlitchTip |
| Auth | Clerk Free tier | 50,000 monthly retained users free per app, with drop-in components for Next.js, React and Astro. | $25/mo | Nile , Asgardeo , Better Auth |