πŸ–₯️ Free deployment offerings

Free deployment offerings

In this section, we will showcase some free options that allow you to deploy your application stack. We will also take note of any limitations each of the providers have.

πŸ“ TL;DR

The CYF Curriculum team suggests Netlify Deployment guide. as a free provider to use for both your frontend and backend applications, with Supabase as a free database layer for persistence. This is because among the free tier offerings they have the least amount of limitations. You will need to check these however to make sure they are still suitable for your use case.

If the limitations of Netlify and/or Supabase are not suitable, a good alternative is Fly.io. Do note its free tier is limited to two computers, either one backend and one database, or two backends. If you have multiple projects that you want to deploy you’ll need to either use a different provider or need to pay for those.

Frontend

ProviderTypeDeploymentSnasphotsLimitations
NetlifyCDNAutomatic from GitHubSupported, PRs-
Cloudflare PagesCDNAutomatic from GitHubSupported, All branches-
RenderCDN or Frontend served by backendAutomatic from GitHubSupported, PRsBackend is stopped after inactivity, startup time is slow
Fly.ioFrontend served by backendManualNoneFree tier limited to two backends, or one backend and one database

Backend

ProviderTypeDeploymentSnasphotsLimitations
NetlifyServerlessAutomatic from GitHubSupported, PRsRequires Express.JS serverless wrapper, does not support all Express.JS features
RenderPersistentAutomatic from GitHubSupported, PRsBackend is stopped after inactivity, startup time is slow
Fly.ioPersistentManualNoneFree tier limited to two backends, or one backend and one database.
GlitchPersistentManualNoneBackend is stopped after inactivity, startup time is slow. Not designed for production system
Cloudflare PagesServerlessAutomatic from GitHubSupported, All branchesDoes not support Express.JS serverless wrapper at all, backend needs to be written in a different framework, like Hono

Database

ProviderTypeIntegrationLimitations
SupabaseRelational, PostgreSQLNoneStops after one week of inactivity
RenderRelational, PostgreSQLIntegrates with Render based backends automaticallyGets deleted after 3 months without payment
Fly.ioRelational, PostgreSQLIntegrates with fly.io based backends automaticallyFree tier limited to one backend and one database. Database can only be accessed from Fly.io backends.
Cloudflare D1Relational, SQLiteIntegrates with Cloudflare Pages automaticallyNot following the Postgres SQL standard