Free Tier Services Directory
Free Tier Services Directory
A directory of hosted services that are free to start on, organised by what a small organisation actually needs to do: put a site online, send email, collect responses, store files, add AI, measure what is happening, and keep the plumbing between them working.
Everything listed has a standing free tier rather than a trial. 437 services across ten subject pages.
Free tiers are not charity. They are the top of a pricing funnel, and the allowance is set where it stops being cheap for the provider and starts being expensive for you. That is fine, and often the right trade for a small organisation, but it is worth knowing which of these you could leave if the terms changed. The open-source and self-hostable entries are the ones where that answer is easiest.
Sections
- Free tier: Websites and publishing — 40 services. Hosting, content management, publishing tools.
- Free tier: Email — 72 services. Sending, newsletters, forwarding, testing, validation.
- Free tier: Images, video and files — 56 services. Storage, sharing, image CDNs, media processing.
- Free tier: Data sources and reference APIs — 56 services. Location, reference data, news, markets, weather.
- Free tier: Developer tooling — 55 services. API clients, mocks, webhooks, scraping, JSON and SQL tools.
- Free tier: Measuring without surveilling — 39 services. Analytics, with the privacy-preserving options first, and consent tooling.
- Free tier: Forms and surveys — 35 services. Form back ends, hosted builders, surveys, signatures.
- Free tier: AI tools and services — 33 services. Model access, evaluation and observability, notebooks.
- Free tier: Design and visual assets — 33 services. Design tools, page builders, icons, templates.
- Free tier: Documents and PDFs — 18 services. Generating documents, and extracting data from them.
How to read this
An entry here is not a recommendation. The free allowance quoted is what the provider advertised when the page was compiled, and providers change it without notice, usually downwards. Where a service is open source or self-hostable that is stated, because it changes what happens to you if the free tier disappears.
Free tiers also differ in what they cost you in other currencies. Some are paid for with your visitors' data, some with branding on your pages, some with a lock-in that gets expensive at the point you outgrow the tier. Those are noted where they are known.
Currency
Compiled September 2026. Nothing here has been independently verified against the providers. Check before relying on any of it, and treat an old page as a starting point for searching rather than as an answer.
See also
Digital sovereignty, Open-weight model, Surveillance capitalism, AI Terminology Glossary