TL;DR. "Free forever" only means something if the platform tells you exactly what's capped, what isn't, and how they make money when you're not paying them. The useful questions to ask aren't about the price — they're about the limits, the pricing triggers, and the exit path. Here's how to evaluate any platform's "free forever" claim in five minutes.
The four kinds of "free" you'll run into
When a platform says "free," it's usually one of four things. They're not the same, and the difference matters a lot after month six.
- Free trial. Free for 14 days, 30 days, or "until you deploy your first production app." After that, you pay or you stop. Fine for evaluation, not fine if you needed a long-term home for your project.
- Free tier. Unlimited time, but bounded usage — so many API calls per month, so many active users, so much bandwidth. You stay free as long as you stay small. The moment you grow, you pay.
- Credit-based free plan. You get a monthly allowance of "credits" (AI generations, builds, deploys). Credits roll over or don't, refill monthly or don't. When they run out, features stop working until the clock resets or you buy more.
- Free forever (the real thing). A specific set of features that are free for as long as the platform exists, without a "usage will force you to pay" trapdoor. Upgrades exist for different features, not for the same features at higher volume.
Only the fourth one actually matches what most people hear when they read "free forever." The first three will eventually cost you money if you keep using the platform. That's not bad — those are fair business models — it's just not what "forever" suggests.
Why most "free forever" claims don't hold up
It's expensive to run a hosting platform. Servers, databases, CDN bandwidth, storage, and support people all cost real money. A platform that offers "free forever" has to answer one question: how do they make money from free users?
There are really only four answers:
- They don't. Free users subsidize paid users, the company burns venture capital, and eventually the free plan gets pared back or killed. This is the most common outcome. You've seen it happen to Heroku's free tier, MongoDB Atlas's shared cluster tier, AWS Lightsail's free-hours offer, and countless others.
- They upsell a specific feature. The core thing (hosting, a database, storage) stays free. A narrower feature (custom domains, private repos, commercial use, published public URLs) costs money. Free users who don't need the paid feature stay free — and the math works because hosting costs are dominated by a handful of heavy users.
- They sell something else. Your attention (ads), your data (aggregated insights), your workflow integration (enterprise deal that's five levels up from your hobby project). You're free because you're not the customer.
- They meter AI usage. The hosting is free; the AI generation you use to build with is metered and charged per prompt, per token, or per "credit." This is how Lovable, Replit, Bolt.new, and v0 work.
Model 2 is the only one where "free forever" is likely to stay true over years. If a platform can't tell you what they charge for, they're on one of the less-stable models.
What should actually be free
For an AI app builder with hosting, here's the baseline you should expect from any honest "free forever" plan:
| Capability | Should be free? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting static files / HTML / JS | Yes | Bandwidth is cheap; a static site at personal scale costs cents per month |
| A small database | Yes | Most personal apps fit in <1GB; shared Postgres is near-free per tenant |
| File storage (photos, uploads) | Yes, capped at ~1GB | Storage is cheap but not free; a cap keeps costs predictable |
| HTTPS / SSL certs | Yes | Let's Encrypt is free; no platform should charge for basic HTTPS |
Custom subdomain (like yours.platform.app) | Yes | Costs the platform nothing |
| Email auth / password auth | Yes | Compute is cheap; sending transactional email is the real cost |
| Enough bandwidth for personal use | Yes, with a soft limit | Most apps under ~100GB/mo aren't meaningfully expensive to serve |
And here's what usually isn't free, for reasons that are actually defensible:
| Capability | Usually paid | Why it's fair |
|---|---|---|
| Custom domain (yourdomain.com) | Paid | Requires DNS management, certificate provisioning, and platform-level verification |
| Publishing to the open web (public URLs) | Often paid | Public sites generate support load, abuse vectors, and SEO-indexed content the platform has to moderate |
| Commercial use / paid users of your app | Paid | If you charge your users, the platform wants a cut — this is how the infrastructure gets funded |
| Large-scale bandwidth or storage | Paid | High-volume usage has real, unbounded cost |
| SLAs, priority support, dedicated resources | Paid | These cost real headcount and operations time |
If the "paid" column of your platform's pricing is anything other than the items above — if hosting itself or a small database costs money at any scale — it's a free tier, not a free forever plan. That's fine, you just shouldn't call it forever.
How Hatchable's "free forever" works
Since this is a Hatchable article, we should be transparent about our own model. The free plan — we call it Personal, but commercial use is fine too — includes hosting, database, file storage (1GB), auth, and custom subdomains. Those things never cost anything, no matter how long you use them or what you use them for.
We charge for two things:
- $12/month Pro. Unlocks public publishing (your app at a custom domain, indexable by search engines, shareable on the open web). Projects that are private to you and invited collaborators stay free; this is for when you want an audience beyond people you invite.
- $39/month per project for App tier. A per-project upgrade for projects that need higher resource limits — more users, more database rows, more throughput. Only applies to projects that outgrow the default caps; your other projects stay free.
Our free tier works because we don't charge for AI usage. Most of our competitors bundle AI inference with hosting and charge a combined monthly fee — which is why their free tiers run out of credits. Hatchable doesn't touch your AI (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex — whatever you use). We host the output. Output hosting is a commodity business where 1GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth genuinely costs us pennies.
What that means concretely: a family chore tracker, a small-business inventory app, a personal portfolio, a coffee shop's menu site, an internal dashboard for a paid service you run — any of these stays free on Hatchable forever. You pay the month you decide to open the app to the public on a custom domain, or the month a specific project outgrows the default per-project resource caps.
Red flags when evaluating "free forever"
A rough checklist you can run on any platform's pricing page in a few minutes:
- Is there a credit counter? If the free plan has "X AI credits per month" or "Y builds per day," credits will run out. "Free forever" with a monthly cliff isn't forever; it's a monthly free tier.
- Is there an active-user cap? "Free for up to 10 active users" means the moment your family-of-four chore app gets used by four grandparents and three cousins, you pay. Caps on usage count, not just features, are the trapdoor.
- Do they charge for "production" use? Some platforms are free until you flip a "production" switch. If you want to use the thing you built, you pay. Worth knowing before you build.
- Is the free plan a default or a checkbox? Platforms that default to a free trial and require an affirmative choice to stay free often don't want you to stay free. Platforms that make the free plan the default signal that they expect free users to be around long-term.
- What's the cost to leave? Can you export your code and data, or are you locked in? If leaving means rewriting from scratch, "free" costs more than you think — your future self pays when it's time to move.
- Have they already cut their free tier? Heroku killed the Hobby Dev tier in 2022. MongoDB Atlas tightened the shared cluster several times. Past behavior predicts future behavior. It takes thirty seconds to search "[platform name] free tier killed" and see what comes up.
The cost of free when things go wrong
One thing "free" platforms don't emphasize: when a free service has an outage or bug or support issue, you're at the back of the queue. That's not unreasonable — paid users fund the support team — but it's worth knowing. If you're building something you care about, budget mentally for eventually paying some platform, either this one's paid tier or a different platform entirely. "Free" is sustainable for personal work; for anything you'd mourn losing, have a Plan B.
The practical move: build on a free tier that lets you export your code and data at any time, so the decision to stay free, upgrade, or move is always yours and cheap. Lock-in is the real cost; the monthly bill is the advertised cost.
Genuinely free AI app hosting.
Database, auth, and storage included. No credits, no trial, no time limit.
Get started free →Frequently asked questions
What happens if Hatchable shuts down?
Same thing that happens if any hosting platform shuts down — you need to move. This is why the "can I export my code and data?" question matters. Hatchable's answer is yes, at any time, to any standard format. The files are yours; the database is standard Postgres you can dump. Not every platform answers that way, and it's worth asking before you commit.
Is "free forever" just marketing language?
It can be. The honest version is when a platform commits to a specific set of capabilities — say, hosting plus a small database plus auth — staying free, with upgrades offered for different capabilities (custom domains, commercial use, published URLs). If the same capability you rely on can get priced in, "forever" isn't the right word.
What usually triggers a free user getting charged?
Usually one of four things: (1) you hit a usage cap (bandwidth, storage, users), (2) credits run out, (3) you need a feature in the paid tier (custom domain, public publishing, commercial use), or (4) the platform pivots and removes the free plan. The first three are predictable and visible on the pricing page. The fourth isn't — which is why it's the one to worry about.
Why do so many AI platforms use credits?
Because LLM inference is expensive and scales roughly linearly with usage. Platforms that bundle AI + hosting in one monthly fee have to cap something, and credits are a cleaner way to do it than per-user or per-app limits. It's not wrong, it's just a different model. Hatchable unbundles — you bring your own AI (with its own pricing), and we host the result without metering.
Should I start on a free tier or pay from the start?
Start free. Most projects die in the first month; there's no reason to pay for something you haven't committed to yet. The only case for paying from day one is if you need something the free tier doesn't offer — a custom domain, a specific SLA, or commercial use permission — and you already know you need it. Otherwise, free is the right starting point; upgrade if and when the need is real.
What does "bring your own AI" mean?
Instead of the platform bundling AI (and charging for it), you connect your own AI tool — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex, or any MCP-compatible agent — to the hosting platform. The platform never touches your AI provider's bill. You pay whoever provides the AI (often free tiers for small-scale use), and you pay the platform nothing for the AI piece. Hatchable works this way.