Most engineering budgets bleed out long before an application ever hits real traffic. We provision oversized relational clusters, pay for idle compute, and absorb enterprise SaaS costs for MVPs that could easily run on baseline allowances. The dirty secret of modern cloud infrastructure is that you can deploy resilient, production-ready workloads at zero marginal cost if you know where the architectural boundaries lie.
Curating these resources usually requires parsing hundreds of marketing pages and pricing calculators. The community behind free-for.dev solves this by aggregating developer-focused SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings under non-negotiable operational criteria: lifetime access (or a minimum 12-month operational runway), no paywalled TLS, mandatory SSO support, and fully managed "as-a-Service" delivery so you are not left babysitting host nodes.
Let us break down how to architect your stack using these perpetual allocations.
Hyperscaler Compute and Managed Platform Tiers
The major cloud providers offer perpetual baselines designed to capture developers early. If you design around their capacity constraints, these platforms serve as rock-solid backbones for core infrastructure.
| Cloud Provider | Service Category | Capacity Limits & Operational Allowances |
|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud Platform | App Engine | 28 frontend instance hours, 9 backend instance hours per day |
| Cloud Firestore | 1 GB storage, 50K reads, 20K writes, 20K deletes daily | |
| Compute Engine | 1 non-preemptible e2-micro instance, 30 GB HDD | |
| Cloud Functions | 2M invocations per month | |
| Cloud Run | 2M requests per month | |
| Google Gemini API | 15 RPM, 1,500 RPD, 1M TPM | |
| Amazon Web Services | EC2 | 750 hours per month t2.micro/t3.micro (12-month tier) |
| S3 | 5 GB object storage, 20K Get / 2K Put requests (12-month tier) | |
| Lambda | 1M requests per month | |
| DynamoDB | 25 GB NoSQL storage | |
| RDS | 750 hours per month db.t2.micro/t3.micro/t4g.micro (12-month tier) | |
| Microsoft Azure | Virtual Machines | 1 B1S Linux VM, 1 B1S Windows VM (12-month tier) |
| Functions | 1M requests per month | |
| Azure DevOps | 5 active users, unlimited private Git repositories | |
| Cosmos DB | 25 GB storage, 1000 RU throughput | |
| Static Web Apps | Build, deploy, and host static apps with included SSL | |
| Oracle Cloud | Compute | 2 AMD VMs (1/8 OCPU, 1 GB RAM) OR 2 Arm A1 cores (12 GB RAM) |
| Object Storage | 10 GB storage | |
| Bandwidth | 10 TB egress per month | |
| IBM Cloud | Cloudant Database | 1 GB data storage |
| API Connect | 50K API calls per month | |
| Cloudflare | Edge Network & Security | DNS, DDoS mitigation, CDN, SSL (unlimited domains) |
| Workers | 100K requests per day | |
| R2 | 10 GB per month |
Oracle Cloud stands out on raw resource allocation by offering up to 12 GB of RAM across two Arm A1 cores along with 10 TB of monthly egress. Cloudflare handles boundary security and edge logic, offering unlimited DNS, CDN routing, and SSL management alongside 100K daily worker invocations.
Source Control and Distributed Repositories
Code management platforms form the operational core of continuous delivery pipelines. Selecting the right platform depends on team size, licensing models, and integrated execution engines:
- GitHub: Offers unlimited public and private repositories with unlimited collaborators. The platform integrates native CI/CD through Actions, Codespaces environments, package and container registries, static site hosting, project boards, and AI Copilot integration.
- GitLab: Delivers unlimited public and private Git repositories for up to 5 collaborators. It bundles integrated CI/CD runners, container registry storage, static hosting, and issue tracking.
- Bitbucket: Provides unlimited public and private repositories capped at 5 users, featuring native Pipelines for execution tasks.
- Codeberg: Tailored for free and open-source software projects, providing non-commercial public and private Git repository hosting.
Managed Data Infrastructure and Edge Storage
Operating self-hosted databases introduces patching overhead, replication concerns, and backup maintenance. Modern managed database layers abstract this complexity behind serverless primitives:
- Supabase: Serves as a managed open-source Firebase alternative. The free tier provisions integrated authentication, Realtime database updates, and Object Storage.
- Neon: Built for serverless Postgres workflows. Grants 0.5 GB storage per project across 10 projects, 10 branch environments per project, and 20 active compute hours monthly.
- Turso by ChiselStrike: Runs SQLite at the network edge. The starter tier allocates 9 GB total storage, 500 databases, and 1 billion row reads per month.
- CockroachDB Cloud: Distributed SQL allocating 50M Request Units (RUs) and 10 GiB storage monthly.
- MongoDB Atlas: Managed document storage with a 512 MB perpetual storage cluster.
- Upstash: Serverless Redis for distributed caching, granting 500K commands per month with a 256 MB maximum database size.
- Airtable: Combines relational mechanics with spreadsheet tooling. Includes unlimited bases, 1,200 records per base, and 1K API requests monthly.
Application Hosting and Static Delivery
Deploying application frontends to global edge networks removes origin server bottlenecking entirely:
- Vercel: Optimized for Next.js and static site generators. Deploys with integrated global CDN routing, automatic SSL termination, and preview environments on every push.
- Netlify: Continuous deployment platform for static sites and applications, provisioning 300 build credits monthly (roughly 30 GB bandwidth).
- Render: Unified application cloud providing free tier options across web services, static sites, databases, global CDN routing, and managed SSL.
- DigitalOcean App Platform: Allows engineers to deploy up to 3 static sites free under its Starter tier.
Automated CI/CD Pipelines
Build automation maintains shipping velocity without manual deployment interventions:
- GitHub Actions: Native build automation. Unlimited for public repositories with managed private allocations.
- GitLab CI/CD: Integrated continuous delivery engine. Unrestricted on public repositories with bounded allowances on private projects.
- CircleCI: Full-featured continuous delivery tier delivering 6,000 build minutes per month for unlimited collaborators. Open-source initiatives receive 80,000 build minutes.
- Codemagic: Specialized continuous integration pipeline for mobile applications, offering 500 free build minutes monthly.
Identity, Authentication, and User Access
Rolling custom authentication systems introduces critical security liabilities. These providers handle user lifecycle management, session tokens, and security enforcement:
- WorkOS: Scales up to 1M Monthly Active Users (MAU) on the free tier. Supports email/password credentials, social logins, Magic Auth links, and MFA.
- Clerk: Handles complete identity lifecycles with drop-in UI components for sign-in, registration, and profile control. Free tier covers unlimited apps up to 50K Monthly Remembered Users (MRU) per app alongside 2FA/MFA.
- Auth0: Managed SSO identity platform supporting up to 25K MAU, custom domains, and unlimited social connections.
- SuperTokens: Embeds directly into your application architecture, offering an open-source model free for up to 5K MAU.
API Management, Data Extraction, and Tooling
Connecting decoupled microservices requires reliable API routing, data scraping, and local debugging harnesses:
- Zuplo: Edge API management layer handling API key authentication, rate limiting, automated documentation, and monetization. Free tier includes 10 projects and 1M requests per month.
- Postman: Desktop and cloud-based API testing client supporting REST and GraphQL workflows.
- IPinfo: IP intelligence API delivering geolocation, company, carrier, and domain data. The free tier handles up to 50K requests monthly.
- APIfy: Web scraping and browser automation platform that transforms web endpoints into APIs, providing $5 in platform credits monthly.
Generative AI Infrastructure and LLM Observability
Engineering production LLM applications requires continuous tracing, evaluation harnesses, and access to inference runtimes:
- Google Gemini API: Direct access to Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash models, constrained to 15 RPM, 1,500 RPD, and 1M TPM.
- OpenRouter: Unified gateway routing NLP workloads to free models such as DeepSeek R1, DeepSeek V3, Llama, and Moonshot AI.
- Langfuse: Open-source LLM engineering and tracing platform for debugging and analysis. Includes a perpetual free tier of 50K observations per month.
- Future AGI: LLM application evaluation and observability system. Free allocation delivers 50 GB storage, 2K evaluation credits, 100K AI gateway requests, 1M text simulation tokens, and 60 minutes of voice simulation.
System Security, Analysis, and PKI
Production posture requires strict secret auditing, vulnerability discovery, and automated certificate renewals:
- Let's Encrypt: Automated, globally trusted Certificate Authority issuing free TLS certificates.
- GitGuardian: Continuous secret detection engine scanning repositories for exposed keys. Free for individuals and teams up to 25 developers.
- Dependabot: Automated vulnerability scanning and dependency updates supporting Ruby, JavaScript, Python, PHP, Elixir, Rust, Java, .NET, Go, Elm, Docker, Terraform, Git Submodules, and GitHub Actions.
- Have I Been Pwned?: Security verification API to check credentials and domains against known breach databases.
- Mozilla Observatory: Configuration and security auditing scanner to identify infrastructure misconfigurations.
Engineering Collaboration
Distributed teams require low-overhead real-time coordination tools:
- Discord: Real-time text, voice, video, and screen-sharing communication platform supporting Markdown syntax for unlimited team members.
- Notion: Unified operational workspace combining team wikis, project documentation, task management, and structured databases.
- Miro: Collaborative whiteboarding platform supporting distributed cross-device diagramming and architecture planning.
- Trello: Kanban-style visual task tracking with support for unlimited personal boards and up to 10 team boards.
- Zoom: Video conferencing infrastructure with a free allocation supporting up to 100 participants with a 40-minute duration limit.
The index behind free-for.dev continues to expand through the contributions of more than 1,600 engineers. Maintaining a lean cost structure is an architectural choice. By chaining these managed tiers together, you can run robust, highly available architectures while keeping your operating expenditures at zero.
Reference
https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev