[Zero Two]

A running list of genuinely useful free tiers and tools that I keep coming back to. Not trials - actual permanent free tiers or fully free tools.

Hosting and infrastructure:

• Cloudflare - CDN, Workers (serverless, 100k requests/day free), Pages (static hosting, unlimited), R2 (10GB object storage, no egress fees), D1 (SQLite database), Tunnel (expose local services). The free tier is remarkably generous.
  
• Oracle Cloud Free Tier - 4 ARM Ampere cores, 24GB RAM, always-free. Legitimately good for self-hosting.
  
• Fly.io - 3 small VMs and 3GB storage on free tier. Good for small always-on apps.
  
• Render - static site hosting free, PostgreSQL free (limited storage), services spin down on inactivity on free tier.
  

Development tools:

• GitHub - unlimited public repos, unlimited private repos (up to 3 collaborators), Actions (2000 min/month), Codespaces (60h/month)
  
• Supabase - Postgres database, auth, storage, realtime. Free tier: 500MB DB, 1GB storage, 2GB bandwidth
  
• PlanetScale - MySQL-compatible, serverless driver, free hobby tier
  
• Upstash - serverless Redis and Kafka. Free tier is genuinely usable for small projects
  

Design and assets:

• Figma - free for individuals, 3 projects
  
• Heroicons - SVG icons from the Tailwind team, MIT licensed
  
• Phosphor Icons - large, consistent icon set, MIT licensed
  
• Google Fonts - obvious but worth stating: thousands of fonts, CDN hosted, free
  

AI and APIs:

• Groq - inference API with very generous free tier, fast inference on open models
  
• Together AI - open model inference, free credits on signup
  

What free tools are you using that aren't on this list?