Free API Hosting: 7 Options and Their Real Limits

August 11, 2026

Quick answer: Cloudflare Workers (100,000 requests per day), Google Cloud Run (2 million requests per month) and AWS Lambda (1 million requests per month) are the three genuinely free API hosts with no expiry and no idle timeout. Render and Supabase are free but go to sleep when idle. Fly.io and Heroku no longer have a free tier at all.

Every "free API hosting" list has the same problem: it names ten providers and never states what free actually buys you. The number that decides whether a host works for your project is the ceiling, and the ceilings move. Every limit below was read off the provider's own pricing or docs page on 11 August 2026, and the two platforms that quietly stopped being free are called out at the end.

What does an API actually need from a host?

It is worth checking the assumption before shopping. Across the 1,632 public APIs currently published on publicapis.dev, the shape of a typical API is narrower than the hosting marketing suggests:

655 (40%) require no authentication at all. No secret to store, no key rotation, no secret manager. That removes a whole category of hosting requirement.
602 confirm CORS support, and 237 of those are also keyless. These get called straight from browser JavaScript, so the host has to let you set arbitrary response headers. Most do; a few managed platforms do not.
40 are still served over plain HTTP. Every host on this list issues TLS certificates automatically and for free, so in 2026 a plaintext API is a decision rather than a budget constraint.

The practical read: for most public APIs you are hosting a small stateless request handler, not a fleet. That is exactly the workload free tiers are built to absorb. Browse the development category for 167 examples of the shape.

The best free API hosting options, ranked

1. Cloudflare Workers

Verdict: the best default for a stateless JSON API. Free ceiling is 100,000 requests per day with 10 ms of CPU time per invocation and no spin-down, so there is no cold start to design around. The 10 ms budget is CPU time, not wall-clock, so waiting on a database or an upstream API does not count against it. The constraint that bites is the runtime: Workers is not Node, so native dependencies are out. Listed on our sister directory as Cloudflare Workers.

2. Google Cloud Run

Verdict: the most generous free tier if you want a plain container. 2 million requests, 180,000 vCPU-seconds and 360,000 GiB-seconds per month, and you deploy any image that listens on a port. No runtime restrictions and no language restrictions. It scales to zero, so the first request after a quiet period pays a cold start, and the free tier is aggregated per billing account rather than per project.

3. AWS Lambda

Verdict: the safe institutional choice. 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds per month, which for a 128 MB function is a very large amount of compute. The free allowance does not apply to Provisioned Concurrency, so leave that off. The real cost of Lambda is not money, it is the surrounding setup: API Gateway or a function URL, IAM, and logs that bill separately.

4. Render

Verdict: best when you want a normal long-running app, not a function. The free instance gives you 512 MB of RAM and 0.1 CPU, and Render spins the service down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic. It spins back up on the next request, so the first visitor after an idle period waits. Anything written to the local filesystem is lost on spin-down. Fine for a side project, wrong for anything with a latency promise. See Render alongside 21 other options in the hosting category.

5. Supabase

Verdict: best when the API is mostly a database. The free plan covers unlimited API requests, a 500 MB database, 500 MB of RAM and 5 GB of egress, and it hands you a REST API over your tables without writing a handler at all. The limit nobody quotes: free projects are paused after one week of inactivity and must be restored by hand. Supabase is the right pick for a data-backed API and the wrong one for something that must answer at 3am after a quiet fortnight.

6. Oracle Cloud Always Free

Verdict: the only entry that gives you a real always-on machine. Oracle's Always Free services carry no expiry, which puts a persistent VM with a public IP in reach at zero cost. In exchange you own everything above the metal: the OS, the web server, TLS renewal, deploys, patching. Pick it when you need a background worker, a persistent process or a database on the same box, and accept that the free tier's capacity is not guaranteed on demand.

7. Vercel Hobby

Verdict: fastest to ship, and the one licence you must actually read. The developer experience is excellent and functions are included, but the Hobby plan is restricted to non-commercial, personal use under Vercel's fair-use guidelines. That is not a technical limit, it is a legal one, and it disqualifies Hobby for anything with a paying customer attached.

Which one should you pick?

Match the host to the shape of the API, not to the size of the free tier:

A stateless JSON endpoint, called often, latency matters: Cloudflare Workers. No cold start is worth more than a bigger monthly quota.
An existing container or an unusual runtime: Cloud Run. It takes whatever you already build.
A framework app with routes, middleware and a build step: Render, if you can live with the idle spin-down.
An API that is really a database with a thin skin over it: Supabase.
Anything that must stay warm and hold state: Oracle Always Free, and budget the sysadmin time.

What is no longer free?

Two names still lead these lists and should not:

Fly.io sunset its free allowances. New organisations get a trial credit and then pay as they go, with the old allowances honoured only for accounts that predate the change.
Heroku has had no free dynos since 2022. The cheapest plan is Eco at $5 per month, and Eco dynos still sleep.

If a guide recommends either as free, it has not been checked recently, which is also a fair warning about the rest of its numbers.

Frequently asked questions

Can you host an API for free permanently?

Yes. Cloudflare Workers, Cloud Run, AWS Lambda and Oracle's Always Free services have no expiry date and no trial clock. They have monthly or daily ceilings instead, and staying under the ceiling costs nothing indefinitely.

Which free API host has no cold starts?

Cloudflare Workers. Its isolates start in single-digit milliseconds and it does not spin services down for inactivity. Cloud Run and Lambda scale to zero, Render sleeps after 15 minutes idle, and a free Supabase project pauses after a week.

How much traffic can a free tier handle?

More than most public APIs see. 100,000 requests a day is roughly 1.15 requests per second sustained, and 2 million a month is about 0.75 per second. For comparison, an open reference API such as Open-Meteo serves far more, but a typical hobby or portfolio API never approaches these numbers.

Is free API hosting good enough for production?

For a read-only or low-write API, usually yes, with two caveats: the free tiers have no uptime guarantee, and an overage either throttles you or starts billing without warning. Set a budget alert on day one and treat a sleeping free instance as an outage in your own head, because your users will.

Do I need a credit card to use a free tier?

It varies by provider and it changes, so check at signup. As a rule the hyperscalers verify identity with a card even inside a permanently free allowance, while the smaller platforms tend not to ask until you exceed the free plan.