Free hosting for vibe coded apps: what actually exists
You vibe coded something. It works. You want to send a link to three friends without entering a credit card. Simple ask — surprisingly hard to answer, because "free tier" means five different things across the industry.
Here's the fine print, platform by platform, for the kind of full-stack app AI tools generate.
The four flavors of "free"
Before the list, the taxonomy. Every free tier is one of these:
- Actually free — runs continuously, no expiry, no card.
- Free but asleep — free until someone visits, then a cold start while your service wakes up.
- Free trial in disguise — a credit that runs out, then it's a paid product.
- Free for frontends only — generous for static files, no real backend or database.
The trap for vibe coders: AI tools generate full-stack apps, and most free tiers are built for category 4.
Platform by platform
Launchmatic — category 2, and yes, we're biased, so here are the actual numbers instead of adjectives: one service, a 1 GB Postgres, an SSL-secured *.launchmatic.app subdomain, GitHub auto-deploy, and MCP access for agent-driven deploys. No card, no expiry — and the honest fine print: the free service sleeps after 30 idle minutes and wakes automatically on the next request. What separates it from the other category-2 tiers is what doesn't expire (the Postgres has no countdown) and the upgrade path: $9/mo makes one site always-on, which is the cheapest no-sleep option on this list. What's not free: custom domains (Pro tier).
Vercel (Hobby) — category 4 done well. Excellent for frontends and light API routes; non-commercial use only. The moment your app is a persistent server or needs a bundled database, you're assembling marketplace add-ons with their own free-tier fine print. Full comparison here.
Render — category 2. Free web services spin down after idle minutes and cold-start on the next request — noticeable when you share a demo link. Free Postgres has an expiry date measured in days, not months. Fine print details in our comparison.
Railway — category 3. A one-time trial credit, then usage-based billing with a monthly minimum. Not a criticism of the platform — the meter is the product — but it's not "free hosting" in the sense this post means. Comparison.
Heroku — no free tier since 2022. The cheapest dynos sleep on idle. People searching "Heroku free alternative" are most of the reason this post exists; we wrote that up too.
Cloudflare Pages/Workers — category 1 if your app fits the isolate runtime: static frontends and small stateless functions, genuinely free at remarkable scale. A full-stack app with a database and long-lived processes doesn't fit.
GitHub Pages / Netlify free — category 4. Great for static sites. Your FastAPI backend has nowhere to run.
Builder-native free tiers (Lovable, Bolt, Replit) — usually category 2 or 3: preview URLs tied to your builder subscription, sleeping or watermarked on free plans. Convenient while you're iterating inside the tool; not a home for a real deployment.
The decision in one table
| Platform | Always-on backend? | Free database? | Expires? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launchmatic | Sleeps on idle, auto-wakes ($9/mo = always-on) | 1 GB Postgres, no expiry | No |
| Vercel Hobby | Serverless only | Add-on dependent | No |
| Render free | Sleeps on idle | Yes, time-limited | DB expires |
| Railway | Trial credit | While credit lasts | Yes |
| Heroku | No free tier | — | — |
| Cloudflare | Isolates only | KV/D1 (not Postgres) | No |
Deploying free in 90 seconds
If your project is a repo (and if an AI tool wrote it, it is):
npm i -g @launchmatic/cli
lm login
lm deploy
Need a database first: lm db create app-db --service <serviceId>. Using Claude Code? Skip the terminal entirely — register the MCP server and ask it to deploy.
The deeper decision framework — builder hosting vs frontend clouds vs containers, and when each is right — lives in the vibe coding hosting guide.