One of the most quietly influential documents in modern software is a plain list. The free-for.dev repository on GitHub, maintained under the ripienaar handle, catalogs SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that carry genuinely free tiers for developers, and the numbers around it tell the story of its reach: 142,044 stars, 15,254 forks, and a trending-board surge of 1,375 stars in a single day. Created in 2015 and last pushed on November 4, it is very much alive.
The premise is simple and, in its way, strict. As the README puts the problem: developers and open-source authors face many services with free tiers, yet hunting down every one of them takes time. The list solves that — not as a marketing index but as a curated artifact, built from pull requests, reviews and ideas contributed by more than 1600 people.
The Rules Behind The List
What earns a service a line in the file? The scope is limited to things infrastructure developers — system administrators, DevOps practitioners and their kin — are likely to find useful. Self-hosted software is out; only as-a-Service offerings qualify. A free tier must actually be a tier, not a free trial, and if the allowance is time-bucketed it must last at least a year. There is even a security bar: single sign-on is fine, but services that restrict TLS to paid-only plans are rejected.
The maintainer is candid that the line is opinionated — a grey line, in the README’s own words — and that some contributions will not make the cut. The tone is that of an editor defending a bibliography’s standards rather than a gatekeeper hoarding a perk.
What The Major Clouds Actually Give Away
The head of the list walks through the always-free allowances of the big providers, and the fine print is where budget projects live or die. Google’s App Engine includes 28 frontend instance hours per day and nine for backends; BigQuery allows 1 TB of querying a month plus 10 GB of storage; Cloud Run carries 2 million requests monthly. On AWS, Lambda permits 1 million requests per month, DynamoDB hands over a 25GB NoSQL database, and CloudFront includes 1TB of egress. Azure’s Functions match Lambda at a million monthly requests, while Cosmos DB offers 25GB of storage and 1000 RUs of throughput.
Oracle’s giveaway is the outlier in kind: two Arm-based Ampere A1 cores paired with 12 GB of memory, deployable as one VM or split across two, alongside 200 GB of block volume and 2 databases at 20 GB each — with the caveat that idle instances get reclaimed. Cloudflare’s tier skews serverless: Workers runs 100k requests a day, R2 object storage covers 10 GB per month with a million Class A operations, and Tunnel can expose a local port through a trycloudflare.com subdomain with no account at all.
Why A List Outlives A Blog Post
Vendor pages advertise; they do not compare. A crowd-maintained index keeps every provider’s fine print in one place, flags the services whose offerings were retired, and lets 1600-plus contributors prune what marketing departments quietly shrink. For a developer budgeting a hobby platform or a startup guarding its runway, the difference between a free tier and a free trial is a bill.
The repository’s 14 open issues and its decade-long run suggest the demand is durable. Free capacity keeps being offered, repriced and withdrawn; the list, updated by the crowd that depends on it, keeps score.
