Free cloud services for developer
Image Source: Picsum
Cloud Devops

Free cloud services for developer

The SQL Whisperer
The SQL Whisperer

Key Takeaways

Maximize your development budget by leveraging ‘Always Free’ cloud tiers from major providers. This guide breaks down the most generous offerings in compute, serverless, and databases—highlighting Oracle’s massive ARM instances and AWS’s high egress limits—to help you architect cost-effective, scalable prototypes without incurring upfront infrastructure expenses.

  • Prioritize ‘Always Free’ tiers over 12-month trials for sustainable side-project hosting and long-term infrastructure testing.
  • Oracle Cloud currently offers the most aggressive free compute tier, providing up to 4 ARM cores and 24GB of RAM, far outpacing AWS and GCP.
  • Serverless remains the most accessible entry point, with every major provider offering at least 1 million monthly function invocations for free.
  • Data egress is the primary hidden cost; while AWS offers 1TB via CloudFront, others like GCP restrict free outbound traffic to as little as 1GB.

Here are some free cloud services for developer. I will update this post as I find more free cloud services for developer.

Google Cloud Platform

  • App Engine - 28 frontend instance hours per day, 9 backend instance hours per day

  • Cloud Firestore - 1GB storage, 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes, 20,000 deletes per day

  • Compute Engine - 1 non-preemptible e2-micro, 30GB HDD, 5GB snapshot storage (restricted to certain regions), 1 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations (excluding China and Australia) per month

  • Cloud Storage - 5GB, 1GB network egress

  • Cloud Shell - Web-based Linux shell/basic IDE with 5GB of persistent storage. 60 hours limit per week

  • Cloud Pub/Sub - 10GB of messages per month

  • Cloud Functions - 2 million invocations per month (includes both background and HTTP invocations)

  • Cloud Run - 2 million requests per month, 360,000 GB-seconds memory, 180,000 vCPU-seconds of compute time, 1 GB network egress from North America per month

  • Google Kubernetes Engine - No cluster management fee for one zonal cluster. Each user node is charged at standard Compute Engine pricing

  • BigQuery - 1 TB of querying per month, 10 GB of storage each month

  • Cloud Build - 120 build-minutes per day

  • Cloud Source Repositories - Up to 5 Users, 50 GB Storage, 50 GB Egress

  • Google Collab - Free Jupyter Notebooks development environment.

  • Full, detailed list

Amazon Web Services

  • CloudFront - 1TB egress per month
  • Cloudwatch - 10 custom metrics and 10 alarms
  • CodeBuild - 100min of build time per month
  • CodeCommit - 5 active users,50GB storage and 10000 request per month
  • CodePipeline - 1 active pipeline per month
  • DynamoDB - 25GB NoSQL DB
  • EC2 - 750 hours per month of t2.micro or t3.micro(12mo)
  • EBS - 30GB per month of General Purpose (SSD) or Magnetic(12mo)
  • Elastic Load Balancing - 750 hours per month(12mo)
  • Glacier - 10GB long-term object storage
  • Lambda - 1 million requests per month
  • SNS - 1 million publishes per month
  • SES - 62.000 messages per month
  • SQS - 1 million messaging queue requests
  • Full, detailed list

Microsoft Azure

  • Virtual Machines - 1 B1S Linux VM, 1 B1S Windows VM (12mo)
  • App Service - 10 web, mobile or API apps (60 CPU minutes / day)
  • Functions - 1 million requests per month
  • DevTest Labs - Enable fast, easy, and lean dev-test environments
  • Active Directory - 500,000 objects
  • Active Directory B2C - 50,000 monthly stored users
  • Azure DevOps - 5 active users, unlimited private Git repos
  • Azure Pipelines — 10 free parallel jobs with unlimited minutes for open source for Linux, macOS, and Windows
  • Microsoft IoT Hub - 8,000 messages per day
  • Load Balancer - 1 free public load balanced IP (VIP)
  • Notification Hubs - 1 million push notifications
  • Bandwidth - 15GB Inbound(12mo) & 5GB egress per month
  • Cosmos DB - 5GB storage and 400 RUs of provisioned throughput
  • Static Web Apps — Build, deploy and host static apps and serverless functions, with free SSL, Authentication/Authorization and custom domains
  • Storage - 5GB LRS File or Blob storage (12mo)
  • Cognitive Services - AI/ML APIs (Computer Vision, Translator, Face detection, Bots…) with free tier including limited transactions
  • Cognitive Search - AI-based search and indexation service, free for 10,000 documents
  • Azure Kubernetes Service - Managed Kubernetes service, free cluster management
  • Event Grid - 100K ops/month
  • Full, detailed list

Oracle Cloud

  • Compute - 2 x64-based with 1 GB RAM each, 4 Arm-based Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB of memory usable as one VM or up to 4 VMs
  • Block Volume - 4 volumes, 200 GB total (used for compute)
  • Object Storage - 10 GB
  • Load balancer - 1 instance with 10 Mbps
  • Databases - 2 DBs, 20 GB each
  • Monitoring - 500 million ingestion datapoints, 1 billion retrieval datapoints
  • Bandwidth - 10 TB egress per month, speed limited to 50 Mbps on x64 based VM, 500 Mbps * core count on ARM based VM
  • Public IP - 2 IPv4 for VMs, 1 IPv4 for load balancer
  • Notifications - 1 million delivery options per month, 1000 emails sent per month
  • Full, detailed list

IBM Cloud

  • Cloud Functions - 5 million executions per month
  • Object Storage - 25GB per month
  • Cloudant database - 1 GB of data storage
  • Db2 database - 100MB of data storage
  • API Connect - 50,000 API calls per month
  • Availability Monitoring - 3 million data points per month
  • Log Analysis - 500MB of daily log
  • Full, detailed list
The SQL Whisperer

The SQL Whisperer

Senior Backend Engineer with a deep passion for Ruby on Rails, high-concurrency systems, and database optimization.

Ultimate list of free web hosting in 2023
Prev post

Ultimate list of free web hosting in 2023

Next post

Polyfill node core modules in Webpack 5

Polyfill node core modules in Webpack 5

You may also like

See all Cloud Devops