Free Tier Services Directory
Free Tier Services Directory
A directory of hosted software and infrastructure services that offer a genuine free tier, organised by what they do. It is meant for small organisations, independent projects and anyone building without a budget, for whom knowing which tools are free to start on is a practical part of not being locked to a single large vendor.
This is a curated subset of free-for.dev, covering the ten sections most relevant to ALT-TEXT's work: 437 services in total, snapshotted on 7 September 2026.
Sections
- Free tier: Generative AI — 21 services. Model APIs, image and audio generation, inference platforms.
- Free tier: APIs, data and machine learning — 150 services. Public and freemium APIs, datasets, speech, vision and model hosting.
- Free tier: Email services — 73 services. Transactional and bulk sending, forwarding, inbox testing, validation.
- Free tier: Storage and media processing — 50 services. Object storage, file delivery, image, audio and video processing.
- Free tier: Forms and surveys — 34 services. Form builders and back-ends that accept submissions without a server.
- Free tier: Analytics and statistics — 34 services. Web and product analytics, including privacy-preserving alternatives.
- Free tier: Design and user interface tools — 33 services. Design tools, icons, illustrations, colour and UI resources.
- Free tier: Web hosting — 25 services. Static and application hosting.
- Free tier: Content management systems — 12 services. Hosted and headless content management.
- Free tier: Privacy management — 5 services. Consent management, cookie banners, privacy policy tooling.
What is and is not listed
The upstream list admits only as-a-service offerings with a real free tier. Free trials do not qualify, nor does self-hosted software, and a time-limited free tier must run for at least a year. Services that restrict TLS to paid plans are excluded on security grounds.
The sections not mirrored here cover ground further from ALT-TEXT's remit, including CI and CD, artifact repositories, log management, package build systems and remote desktop tools. The full list has 57 sections and about 1,300 entries.
Source, currency and attribution
All entries and their descriptions come from free-for.dev, a list maintained by R.I. Pienaar and more than 1,600 contributors at ripienaar/free-for-dev. This directory reproduces their work with light formatting changes only; it adds no independent assessment.
Free tiers change constantly, and nothing here has been verified against the providers. Treat this as a starting point and check the linked service before relying on any allowance. For the current state of the list, go to the source.
See also
Digital sovereignty, Open-weight model, AI Terminology Glossary