Render free tier: 750 free instance hours per month

Render’s free tier gives you Free instances at $0 per month with 512 MB RAM and 0.1 CPU, capped at 750 Free instance hours per workspace per calendar month. Hours reset monthly and do not roll over. Static sites are free. Render’s docs do not state that a payment method is required to start; notably, if you have no payment method on file, services suspend when you hit the quota instead of billing you. Checked against the official pricing and free-tier docs on 2026-08-29.

What 750 hours means

A month is at most 744 hours, so 750 Free instance hours can keep one free web service up all month. Run two free services and they share the same workspace pool, so both cannot be always-on. The counter is per workspace, not per service. The docs also state the consumption rule directly: a Free web service consumes hours only while it is running, “spun-down services don’t consume Free instance hours”, and if a workspace does use up all 750 hours mid-month, Render suspends all its Free web services until the hours reset at the start of the next month.

The spin-down behavior

Free web services spin down after 15 minutes without traffic and take up to about a minute to wake on the next request. Two side effects from the official docs are worth knowing. First, the filesystem is ephemeral, so anything written to disk is lost on restart. Second, while a free service is spun down it serves a disallow-all robots.txt, which matters if you expected a free-tier site to be crawled.

Free Postgres expires

The free database is the sharpest edge here: free Postgres expires 30 days after creation, with a 14-day grace period before deletion. The free Key Value store is in-memory only. Treat both as scratch space, not storage.

Production warning, in their words

Render’s docs say plainly: do not use free instances for production. I mirror that rather than soften it.

Choose or skip

Choose Render if you want a hobby web service or static site that costs nothing and you can live with cold starts. Skip Render’s free tier if you need a persistent database, disk that survives restarts, or anything a paying user depends on.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. This page reports only what the official pages state.

Compare the time-boxed alternatives: the Railway free trial and the Fly.io free trial both end, while Render’s allowance recurs. The Railway matchup gets a full page in Railway vs Render. For the wider decision, read how to choose compute. Every grant I track is on the credits index.