I'm building a full-stack app as a personal project and would like to deploy it publicly. Traffic will be very low—mostly employees or people reviewing my portfolio—and I'm fine with database storage limits. I'm mainly looking for a simple setup that can run for free or nearly free without needing much maintenance.
4 Answers
A common low-traffic setup is Vercel or Netlify for the frontend and serverless functions, combined with Supabase for the database and backend services. The free tiers should be enough for a portfolio project, and serverless functions let you keep database credentials off the client.
Railway is worth checking out if you want something closer to a traditional backend deployment. Its free option is fairly generous for small personal projects, though dormant apps may have cold starts. Vercel can handle the frontend while Railway runs the API or other backend services.
You can run the app on a small virtual machine, such as a free-tier compute instance, or host it from your own computer through a tunneling service. The cloud instance is more reliable because your personal machine doesn’t need to stay powered on, but always check the provider’s limits and billing rules. Free tiers can change, and some services may eventually require payment if usage grows.
Cloudflare is another strong all-in-one option. Pages or Workers can host the frontend and backend, while D1 or R2 can provide storage. Astro can also be deployed as a full-stack app there. It’s inexpensive for small usage, but the platform has its own runtime limitations to learn.
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