Problems with free tiers

Free tiers are usually the first stop for developers who want to get their apps online. They’re easy to sign up for, quick to deploy on, and feel like a low-risk way to test things out. But if you’re serious about running something long term, free tiers come with problems that you need to be aware of.

Problem 1: They Expire

The biggest issue with free tiers is that they don’t last forever. Some are trial periods that only run for 30 or 60 days. Others give you a year before you start paying. It feels great at first, but when the clock runs out, you’re suddenly left with a choice: pay for resources you might not actually need, or scramble to migrate your app elsewhere. And trust me, you probably won’t be migrating your app until at least a year later. Chances are you didn’t abstract your cloud interactions, which makes swapping things out much harder than it sounds.

Problem 2: You Outgrow Them Quickly

Even before a free tier expires, the limits can hit you fast. What starts as a generous set of resources suddenly feels tiny once you add multiple apps, databases, or background jobs. Free tiers are designed to get you in the door, not to support real long-term workloads. Plus, not every service is offered free by providers.

PaaS Platforms and Their Limits

There are also Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers that offer free tiers such as Heroku (back in the day when they had a free tier), Render, Fly.io, or Railway. These platforms give you a smoother experience for deploying apps, but they come with hard limits.

For example:

• You can only host a small number of apps
• API calls or compute hours are capped
• Apps can get spun down (go to sleep) if they’re inactive too long, which can turn off recruiters / users if they’re impatient

In my case, I still have a Fly.io app connected to a MongoDB Atlas cluster that’s been running for three years with solid performance. But Fly.io limits you to about 2 apps on the free plan, which isn’t much.

The point is: these services are great for learning, experimenting, or running small side projects. But if you plan to scale, or even just run multiple apps without lumping together all of your endpoints in one API project, the limits of free tiers start to show quickly.