Every developer has had the same idea at 2 a.m.: build the whole thing, hosting, database, CI, monitoring, email, and see how far zero dollars will take you. Free-for-dev is the list that answers that question honestly. It is a curated directory of cloud services with genuine free tiers, maintained since 2015, and it refuses to list anything that is only a free trial in disguise.
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Key Takeaways
Free-for-dev is a curated list of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings with free tiers of interest to DevOps and infrastructure developers, with 140,702 GitHub stars and 15,012 forks as of October 30, 2026.
The list is strict: a service must offer a real free tier, not just a free trial, and if the tier is time-limited it must last at least a year.
Services that lock basic security behind a paywall, such as restricting TLS to paid plans, are rejected outright.
The directory spans roughly 57 sections, from major cloud providers and CI/CD to monitoring, email, DNS, and managed databases, maintained through pull requests from more than 1,600 contributors.
The honest catch is that free tiers change: always check the provider's current terms before building anything you depend on.
What free-for-dev actually is
Free-for-dev lives at ripienaar/free-for-dev on GitHub, where its one-line description says it all: "A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev." It is not a list of software you install yourself. Its scope statement is explicit: it covers only as-a-service offerings, and only ones that infrastructure developers, system administrators, and DevOps practitioners are likely to find useful. The maintainer describes the list as "a bit opinionated," and that opinion is the whole point.
The scale is what makes it trustworthy. Created in March 2015, the project has run for more than 11 years and gathered 140,702 stars, 15,012 forks, and over 7,500 commits. An independent count from September 24, 2026, tallied 57 sections and 1,305 entries in a README of about 257 KB, with the largest sections being APIs, Data and ML with 136 entries, Tools for Teams and Collaboration with 79, Email with 75, Major Cloud Providers with 72, and Monitoring with 61. That is not a weekend link dump. It is a living reference that is still updated, with new entries landing in late October 2026.
The rules that keep the list honest
Most "free tools" lists are useless because they mix three very different things: genuinely free tiers, time-limited trials, and freemium plans so crippled they are unusable. Free-for-dev draws a hard line, and its rules are worth quoting because they explain why developers keep coming back to it.
First, a service must offer a free tier, not just a free trial. Second, if the free tier is time-bucketed, it must last at least a year. Third, and most unusually, the list judges the free tier from a security perspective: a service that restricts TLS to paid tiers is not accepted, even if everything else looks generous. Single sign-on limits are fine, but charging extra for basic encryption is a disqualifier.
The contributing guide adds more exclusions. Outright rejected are cPanel-style PHP and MySQL hosting, generic frontends to Cloudflare DNS, verbatim copies of other lists, fake or temporary email generators, and generic developer toolbox sites such as format converters and calculators. New submissions must use the pull request template and tick every box, or they are closed without discussion. The guide also states plainly that AI-generated edits are not accepted.
What a zero-dollar stack looks like
The list is organized so you can assemble a complete stack section by section. Start with a major cloud provider, add a source code repo, wire up CI/CD, then layer on monitoring, logging, email, and DNS. Each entry states the free tier in concrete terms, so you can compare plans without opening twenty pricing pages.
The major cloud entries show how different "free" can be. Google Cloud's free tier lists more than 20 products with limits that do not expire, including Cloud Run at 2 million requests per month, BigQuery at 1 TB of queries per month, and Cloud Storage at 5 GB-months. Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier is available for an unlimited period and includes AMD-based and Arm-based Ampere A1 compute, block volume, object storage, and autonomous databases, with the caveat that accounts idle for 30 days or more may be reclaimed. AWS, by contrast, has moved its headline offer toward credits: new customers get 100 dollars in credits immediately and can earn up to 100 dollars more over six months, a reminder that even the biggest providers rewrite their free offers regularly.
Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
Project | free-for-dev, by R.I. Pienaar |
License model | Curated list, free to read and use |
GitHub stars | 140,702 as of October 30, 2026 |
Forks | 15,012 as of October 30, 2026 |
Age | Created March 2015, updated into late October 2026 |
Contributors | More than 1,600 people via pull requests |
Sections | About 57 sections, about 1,305 entries as of September 24, 2026 |
Who should use it, and who should skip it
Free-for-dev fits indie developers, students, and small teams who want to ship a real project without a cloud bill, and DevOps engineers evaluating which managed services are worth adopting before paying. It is also a good reality check before signing up for any "free" plan: if a service is not on the list, or was removed from it, the rules above tell you why that might be.
It is less useful if you need self-hosted software, because that is explicitly out of scope, or if you want a single vendor's opinion, because the list is deliberately vendor-neutral and opinionated about what counts as free. And it is a directory, not a tutorial: it tells you what exists and what each tier allows, but designing the architecture is still your job.
For a broader look at why the open source model makes resources like this possible, read What Is Open Source? What Open Source Means, in Plain English.
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FAQ
What is free-for-dev?
Free-for-dev is a curated list of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to DevOps and infrastructure developers. It is maintained on GitHub at ripienaar/free-for-dev, has more than 140,000 stars, and has been updated since 2015.
Does free-for-dev list free trials?
No. To be eligible, a service must offer a genuine free tier, not just a free trial. If the free tier is time-limited, it must last at least a year, and services that restrict TLS to paid plans are rejected.
What kinds of services does it cover?
About 57 sections, including major cloud providers, source code repositories, APIs and data, CI and CD, testing, security, monitoring, email, PaaS, BaaS, IaaS, managed data services, storage, DNS, web hosting, and education.
Can anyone add a service to the list?
Anyone can submit a pull request, and more than 1,600 people have contributed. New submissions must use the pull request template and meet the eligibility rules, or they are closed without discussion.
Is everything on the list still free?
Free tiers change, and providers rewrite their offers, as AWS did with its credit-based model. Treat the list as a well-filtered starting point and always confirm the provider's current terms before building on a tier.