There is a particular kind of joy in finding something that is genuinely, permanently free. Not free-for-30-days. Not free-until-we-get-acquired. Not free-if-you-hand-over-a-credit-card-and-set-a-calendar-reminder-to-cancel. Just free, indefinitely, because the company decided that hobbyists poking at their platform on a Sunday afternoon is good for business.
I stumbled back onto free-for.dev recently and lost an entire evening to it. It is a single, enormous, community-maintained list of services with real free tiers for people who build things — hosting, databases, monitoring, APIs, CI, DNS, the lot. No sales funnel, no gated download. Just a very long page of “here, this is free, go make something.”
The goal
The list is wonderful but it is also huge, and huge is its own kind of paralysis. So I want to do something smaller and more useful here: pull out four tools that I think are the best possible starting points for a tinkerer. My rules for making this list were strict.
- Free forever on a real plan — not a trial, not credits that quietly burn down.
- No credit card to get started.
- Useful in an evening, not after a certification course.
- Each one scratches a genuinely different itch.
Together they cover the whole arc of a small project: build it, reach it, hear from it, and know when it breaks.
1. Cloudflare Workers & Pages — put something on the internet tonight
This is the one that still feels slightly illegal to me. Cloudflare’s free plan gives you 100,000 requests a day for code that runs on their network, in something like 300 cities around the world. Not on a server you rent and patch and worry about. On their edge.
You write a small JavaScript or Python function, you deploy it, and it exists at a real URL a few seconds later. Pair it with Pages for the static side and you have an actual website with an actual backend for exactly zero rupees, dollars, or pounds a month. The free tier even throws in a database (D1) and a key-value store, so your weekend project can genuinely remember things.
The honest catch: each request gets 10 milliseconds of CPU time. That is plenty for an API, a redirect, a form handler, or a small site. It is not where you go to render video. Know which one you are building.
2. Tailscale — your stuff, from anywhere, without the headache
If you have ever tried to reach a Raspberry Pi at home from a coffee shop, you know the ritual: port forwarding, dynamic DNS, firewall rules, and a low background hum of “have I just exposed this to the entire internet?”
Tailscale deletes that entire ritual. Install it on your laptop, your phone, your home server, and they simply see each other — privately, encrypted, as if they were on the same desk. No ports opened. Nothing published to the world.
The Personal plan is free forever and now covers up to 6 users with unlimited devices, which is far more generous than the last time I looked. It comfortably covers a household, every gadget in it, and a few servers besides. Worth noting it is intended for personal, non-commercial use — which is exactly what we are doing here.
3. ntfy.sh — make your projects text you
This one is small, and I adore it. ntfy sends a push notification to your phone from a single line in a script. That is the entire product.
curl -d "Backup finished 🎉" ntfy.sh/my-very-obscure-topic-nameThat is it. No account, no signup, no API key. Install the app, subscribe to the same topic name, and your phone buzzes. Suddenly every script you own can talk to you: the backup that finished, the download that completed, the sensor that noticed the garage door has been open for an hour.
Because there is no account, the topic name is the password — so pick something nobody would ever guess, not backups. And it is fully open source, so if you ever want to stop trusting someone else’s server, you can run your own copy. That escape hatch is a big part of why I trust it.
4. UptimeRobot — find out before your friends do
There is a specific flavour of embarrassment in someone messaging you “hey, your site’s down” about a thing you built. UptimeRobot’s free plan removes it: 50 monitors, checked every 5 minutes, no credit card required.
It will watch a website, a specific port, a ping, a keyword on a page, even your SSL certificate’s expiry date — which quietly saves you from the most avoidable outage there is. Fifty monitors is far more than a hobbyist will ever need, which is rather the point.
Chain them together
Here is the thing I really want to leave you with. Individually these are four nice tools. Chained, they are a complete little system, and building it is a genuinely satisfying weekend.
Put a small site on Cloudflare Pages, with a Worker handling anything dynamic. Keep the messy half — the Pi, the media box, the thing with too many wires — at home, reachable over Tailscale from wherever you are. Have every script on it ping you through ntfy when it does something interesting. Point UptimeRobot at the public side so you hear about problems from a notification instead of from a friend.
Total monthly cost: nothing. Total learning: quite a lot more than the price suggests.
Go and break something
The reason I like free tiers this much is not the money saved. It is that free removes the last excuse. When an experiment costs nothing, you stop planning it and simply try it — and trying it badly, then fixing it, is how any of this is actually learned.
So go and open free-for.dev, scroll until something makes you curious, and build the daft little thing you have been meaning to build. Nobody is charging you for the attempt.
Free tiers do drift over time — every limit above was checked before publishing, but if you are reading this a year from now, do glance at the pricing page before you commit a project to it.