If you learned to deploy from a tutorial written before 2023, most of what it told you about free hosting is now wrong. Not slightly outdated — wrong in the specific way that costs you an afternoon: the platform still exists, the signup page still works, and the free tier the tutorial was built around is gone.

Here is the actual timeline, why it happened, and — more usefully — the pattern that lets you predict which free tier dies next.

The casualty list

Heroku, November 2022. The original free PaaS, the one every bootcamp taught, ended free dynos and free Postgres outright. Every "deploy your first app free on Heroku" tutorial on the internet became a museum piece overnight.

Railway, July 2023. Positioned as the Heroku successor, then cut its free plan citing crypto-mining abuse. What remains is a one-time trial credit and a token $1/month of usage — enough to prove your account works, not enough to run anything.

PlanetScale, April 2024. The serverless MySQL darling removed its Hobby tier entirely, giving existing free databases weeks to pay or migrate. It remains a paid-only product today.

Fly.io, October 2024. New accounts lost the free allowances. The trial for a new user is now measured in hours, and a card is required for everyone.

AWS, July 2025. The famous "12 months free" EC2 for new accounts was replaced by a credit-based plan that expires in months and then closes the account. The always-free serverless pieces (Lambda, DynamoDB) survived; the free VM did not.

Netlify, September 2025. New accounts moved to a credit system whose effective bandwidth is a fraction of the old 100 GB. The one mercy: it is a hard cap, so it stops rather than bills.

Koyeb, February 2026. Acquired by Mistral AI and immediately closed free signups. A free tier can end not because the model failed, but because the company got bought for its hardware.

Render, April 2026. Kept its free web services but cut free bandwidth from 100 GB to 5 GB per month. The tier survives; its usefulness for anything with an audience does not.

Oracle Cloud, June 2026. The most generous free VM on the market — 4 ARM cores and 24 GB of RAM — was quietly halved to 2 cores and 12 GB. Still the biggest free compute you can get; also a reminder that even the outlier obeys gravity.

The survivor list

Shorter, and worth memorising:

  • Cloudflare — Pages, Workers, R2, and Tunnel. Unmetered static bandwidth, free egress from object storage, no card required. The core limits have not shrunk in years.
  • GitHub Pages — unchanged for a decade, within its non-commercial terms.
  • Google Cloud Run and the e2-micro VM — Google's always-free tier has held steady, though both require a card and can bill past the free line.
  • Supabase, Neon, Turso — the free database tier is alive and well, card-free, with suspend-when-idle as the trade instead of money.

The pattern

Look at the two lists and the structural difference jumps out. The casualties were all cases where your free usage cost the provider real marginal money — compute hours, egress bandwidth, storage on someone else's cloud. Free was a customer-acquisition expense, funded by venture capital, and it ended when the funding climate did.

The survivors are cases where your free usage costs the provider almost nothing, or you are not the customer at all. Cloudflare runs its own network; serving your static site through capacity it already owns is nearly free, and every free user strengthens the network effect it sells to enterprises. GitHub Pages is a rounding error on Microsoft's developer-ecosystem spend. Google's always-free tier is a funnel into a card-on-file billing relationship.

So the test for any free tier is one question: why is this free? If the honest answer is "to acquire me as a paying customer later, while burning investor money on my bandwidth" — build on it expecting eviction. If the answer is "my usage is nearly free to them" or "I am the marketing" — it will probably outlive the tutorial you learned it from.

What this means in practice

Date every tutorial. Anything about free hosting older than a year is unverified until you have looked at the current pricing page. This article included.

Keep the exit cheap. The real cost of a free tier dying is not money, it is migration under deadline. Prefer boring, portable shapes — static files, a SQLite or Postgres dump, a Docker image — over anything that only exists inside one platform's proprietary config. The people burned worst by the Heroku and PlanetScale shutdowns were the ones whose setup could not be described without naming the vendor.

Let the retreat push you home. A machine you own has no free tier to lose. The NAS or mini PC that was a toy in 2021 is, after four years of cuts, quietly the most stable "free hosting" there is — nobody can revoke it, halve it, or get acquired out from under it. That is not nostalgia for self-hosting; it is just where the trend line points.

Free hosting is not dead. But the era when you could assume a free tier was a permanent fact of the landscape ended somewhere around 2023, and building anything meant to last means planning for the day the email arrives.