Free hosting is not free: the hidden cost of every free tier
Every free hosting plan is a trade. Some trades are excellent. The problem is that the price is rarely money — it is latency, control, or a bill that arrives the month you finally get traffic.
Published 2026-08-06 · 7 min read
The four currencies of a free plan
- Latency: cold starts and sleeping containers, paid by your first visitor after a quiet period.
- Capability: no persistent filesystem, no background workers, no raw TCP, execution time caps.
- Bandwidth: generous until it is not — overage pricing is where free plans become expensive fastest.
- Portability: proprietary primitives that make leaving a rewrite rather than a redeploy.
Where free plans are genuinely the right answer
A static marketing site on a global CDN is close to free everywhere and hard to beat. Edge functions for lightweight, stateless request handling are excellent. Preview deployments per pull request are a real productivity gain.
If that describes your project, keep using them. This is not an argument that free PaaS is bad.
Where they break
| Symptom | Root cause | What fixes it |
|---|---|---|
| First request takes 3-10 seconds | The service was scaled to zero | A persistent process on a VM |
| Cron jobs silently stop | Free plans deprioritise or drop scheduled work | Your own cron container |
| Uploads disappear | Ephemeral container filesystem | A mounted volume or object storage |
| Bill spikes after a launch | Metered bandwidth and function invocations | Included 10 TB egress on Oracle |
| Cannot run this library | Serverless runtime is not full Node/Python | A normal Linux container |
The honest cost of self-hosting
Self-hosting swaps a monthly invoice for operational work: OS patching, TLS certificates, deploy scripts, health checks, log retention, backups, and knowing what to do at 2am when the disk fills.
That work is real, and pretending otherwise is how people end up with a broken side project and a security incident. The question is not whether the work exists — it is who does it.
The third option
Oracle's Always Free tier removes the hardware cost permanently: up to 4 ARM OCPUs, 24 GB of RAM, 200 GB of storage and 10 TB of monthly egress, in your own tenancy.
Cheaploy adds the operational layer on top — connect a GitHub repo, get container builds, health-check gated blue/green deploys, automatic HTTPS, log search, metrics, cost anomaly alerts and one-click rollback — for a flat platform fee rather than a per-resource bill.
You keep the infrastructure. If you ever stop paying us, the servers, the containers and the data are still yours.
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Frequently asked
Isn't a $5 VPS simpler?+
It is similar operationally, but you pay monthly and still build the deploy pipeline yourself. Always Free gives you more RAM for $0.
What if my app outgrows the free tier?+
You upgrade the Oracle account and scale the same infrastructure — no migration, because nothing is proprietary.
Does this work for teams?+
Yes. Roles, audit logs and per-project environments are part of the platform.
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