Best Free Cloud for Running a Side Project in 2026

You've got an idea. Maybe it's a small web app, a personal tool, a Discord bot, a portfolio site, or just something you want to tinker with. You don't want to pay for hosting until you know it's worth it.

Good news — you don't have to. Here's where to put it based on what you're actually building.

Static Site or Portfolio

Use Cloudflare Pages. Zero cost, unlimited deploys, global CDN included. You connect your GitHub repo, push code, and it's live. There's nothing to configure and nothing to manage. If your site is just HTML, CSS, and maybe some JavaScript, this is the answer. Don't overthink it.

Runner-up: Netlify or Vercel if you're already in that ecosystem. All three are free for personal projects.

A Real App That Needs a Server

This is where Oracle's free tier earns its reputation. The Arm A1 instance gives you 4 cores and 24 GB RAM for free, permanently. That's more than enough to run a Node.js app, a Python backend, a small database, whatever you need.

The setup takes a bit more work than Cloudflare Pages — you're dealing with an actual Linux server — but once it's running it just runs. I've seen people host full side projects on Oracle free tier for years without spending a cent.

A Bot or Background Script

If your project just needs to run some code on a schedule or respond to events, don't spin up a whole server. Use serverless.

Cloudflare Workers gives you 100,000 requests a day free. AWS Lambda gives you 1 million requests a month free, forever. Either one is more than enough for a bot or a lightweight background job.

Something With a Database

Oracle gives you a free Autonomous Database that's fine for small projects. It's a bit overkill to set up but it works.

If you want something simpler, PlanetScale has a free tier for MySQL, and Supabase has a free PostgreSQL tier. Both are easier to deal with than Oracle's database if you just need somewhere to store data.

Just Experimenting and Learning

Use AWS. Not because it's the cheapest — it's not — but because every tutorial, every Stack Overflow answer, every YouTube video is going to use AWS examples. The 12-month free tier gives you plenty of time to learn. When it expires you can move to Oracle for the long-term free hosting.

Quick Cheat Sheet

Still deciding? The comparison chart shows exactly what each provider gives you side by side.