I'm building a personal full-stack application and would like to deploy it so employees or people viewing my portfolio can try it. Traffic will be very low, and I'm fine with modest database and storage limits. Are there free hosting options that can keep the app online without requiring a paid plan right away?
5 Answers
Railway is fairly straightforward and its free option can be generous for low-traffic personal projects. Vercel is especially convenient if the frontend is the main focus, while Railway or another backend provider can host the API and database. Just check the current pricing and usage rules, since free allowances can change.
A common setup is Vercel or Netlify for the frontend, with Supabase or Neon handling the database and backend services. Supabase can also run server-side functions, so you don’t have to expose database credentials in the client. This works well for small portfolio projects, though free tiers have usage limits and inactive services may have cold starts.
Cloudflare is another good all-in-one option. Pages can host the frontend, Workers can handle backend code, and D1 or R2 can provide database and storage features. Astro can also be deployed as a full-stack app on Cloudflare. It’s a good fit if you’re comfortable with serverless services.
Free cloud tiers are usually enough for a small portfolio project, but they aren’t always permanent or unlimited. Some providers offer always-free resources, such as a small Google Cloud Compute Engine instance, while others provide monthly quotas or introductory credits. Keep an eye on billing settings and resource limits so an unexpected traffic spike doesn’t create charges.
You can run the app on a home computer and expose it with a tunneling service such as ngrok, but the machine needs to stay powered on and connected whenever someone wants to use the site. That’s fine for a demo, but it’s less reliable than cloud hosting and may require extra network and security configuration.
A small always-free virtual machine can run both a simple service and database, but it requires more maintenance than managed platforms. For the easiest deployment, a frontend host plus a managed backend database is usually less work.