The free-tier landscape shifted hard between 2023 and 2026. Heroku killed its free dynos in November 2022, PlanetScale dropped its Hobby plan in early 2024, and Fly.io quietly replaced its always-free allowance with a $5 monthly credit. A lot of "free tier" advice from older blog posts now points at services that will charge you the moment your card is on file. We rebuilt our reference list from scratch in 2026, cross-checking the free-for-dev community catalog against each provider's current pricing page. What survived is genuinely useful for side projects, MVPs, and learning — as long as you know where the cliffs are. Hosting, Edge, and Compute For a typical Node, Next, or Astro side project, three platforms still cover almost everything for $0: Vercel Hobby — 100 GB bandwidth, unlimited static requests, 1 million Edge Function invocations, 100 deployments per day. Personal use only; commercial work requires Pro at $20/month per seat.…