Pricing & Billing
Free Tier
A permanently or temporarily free allowance of a service, used to let you build and test before paying, with limits that cap real production use.
A free tier lets you use a service at no cost within defined limits. Some are permanent, Cloudflare's free CDN and DNS, Oracle Cloud's always-free VMs, the hobby tiers on Vercel and Netlify, and some are time-boxed trials that expire. They exist to get you building before you're paying, and for genuinely small projects they can be all you ever need.
The limits are the whole story. A free tier that covers a side project will throttle, meter, or simply stop serving a real production workload, and the jump to the first paid tier is sometimes steep. Cloudflare's free plan is unusually generous. A trial VM that expires in 30 days is a different kind of free entirely. Read which kind you're getting.
Used well, free tiers are a great way to prototype, learn a platform, or run something tiny indefinitely. The trap is building a growing product on a free tier and discovering the paid economics only when you've outgrown it and are locked in.