A free side-project stack: limits, commercial use and upgrade costs

Compare hosting, databases, editors and open-source grants. Check commercial-use rules, inactivity pauses and paid extras before choosing a free stack.

About this guide

Published by StackOnSale. Publisher: Emmanuel Grenier. Guide updated: 2026-09-13.

Research based on official vendor pages, not a hands-on review.

StackOnSale may earn a commission through disclosed affiliate links on the site. This does not decide which tool fits your needs.

Start with the project's needs, not a list of free logos

Write down what the project must do, whether it supports a business, and what happens if it stops for a day. A learning prototype and a customer-facing service can need different plans even at the same traffic level.

This is a comparison of vendor documentation, not a hands-on performance test. Free allowances are not uptime promises, grants are not automatic approvals, and a paid upgrade is not proof that an application is secure. Dollar prices below are vendor-listed base amounts before taxes and extras; confirm billing currency at checkout.

Vercel Hobby is for non-commercial personal use

Vercel restricts Hobby to personal, non-commercial projects. Do not decide eligibility only by whether you have accepted your first payment: check the intended use against Vercel's rules before deploying a business project.

The free plan includes 1 million function invocations and does not provide team collaboration. When a Hobby limit is exceeded, many features must wait for their allowance to reset instead of charging overage. The documentation describes a 30-day wait in most cases, with a separate Web Analytics rule. Pro starts at $20 per developer seat per month, with usage charges to consider as well.

Supabase: allow for inactivity pauses and backups

Supabase Free includes two active projects and a 500 MB database per project. Its 50,000 monthly active users allowance concerns authentication usage; it does not demonstrate that a particular application can serve 50,000 simultaneous users or handle a given workload. Other usage allowances have their own billing scopes.

Supabase may pause Free projects with low activity over a seven-day period. Restore a paused project from the dashboard. A reminder every two weeks would not prevent a one-week pause. Plan for recovery, and maintain your own tested backups because downloadable automatic database backups are not included on Free. Pro starts at $25 a month and avoids inactivity pausing, but is not a guarantee against every kind of outage.

Cloudflare Workers has separate request and CPU limits

Workers Free lists 100,000 requests per day and 10 milliseconds of CPU time per invocation. Both can matter. CPU time measures active execution, not the time spent waiting for network responses, so a slow external API is not automatically 10 milliseconds of CPU work.

Which limit arrives first depends on the workload. Measure a representative request rather than assuming compute always runs out first. Static-asset requests have separate treatment, and Workers Caching can affect request accounting. Storage and database products have their own allowances. Workers Paid has a $5 USD monthly minimum plus applicable usage charges; it is not unlimited service for $5.

A free editor does not make model usage free

Zed Personal is listed at $0. The editor can be used with your own API keys or external agents, but those providers may charge separately. Owning a key does not mean the associated model usage is free.

Zed Pro is $10 a month with $5 of monthly token credits and unlimited edit predictions. Additional hosted model use is billed at API list prices plus 10%, with spending controls available. Keep editor cost, hosted predictions and model usage as separate lines in your budget. Replit Core and Warp Build, linked below for comparison, are paid plans rather than free substitutes.

Docker and GitLab grants require more than an open-source licence

Docker's sponsored open-source program requires public code and images, an OSI-approved licence, recent activity and no commercial pathway. Donations can be allowed, while selling services or a paid tier does not meet the stated non-commercial requirement. Approved projects receive a year of Docker Team and can renew if eligible. Normal image pull limits are lifted, but abuse limits still apply.

GitLab's program also requires qualifying licences, public projects and a non-profit-making project. Its Ultimate grant is not an automatic benefit of publishing code. Members must renew annually, and GitLab states that support is not included. Check the entire relevant namespace and the current application rules before relying on a grant.

Sentry sponsorship is an application, not a guaranteed free paid plan

Sentry offers open-source sponsorship with Business features and published event allowances. It asks for information about the project and an appropriate licence, with Apache and MIT given as examples. Approval still has to be obtained.

The program states no term limit and allows an on-demand budget to be enabled. Check that setting before assuming all extra usage remains free. We do not assign the sponsorship a dollar value from an unrelated paid plan, or rank it as the easiest program to enter without evidence.

Team tools: use each product's pricing page

Jira Free and Confluence Free each list up to 10 users and 2 GB of file storage on their own pricing pages. Those caps do not apply uniformly across all Atlassian products.

Trello Free allows up to 10 collaborators and 10 boards per Workspace. Atlassian's broader free-software overview still describes Trello without a user limit; that conflicts with Trello's dedicated pricing page. Use the product-specific limit and confirm eligibility before inviting a larger team. Check automation and attachment limits too, rather than treating the user count as the only constraint.

Upgrade before a required capability fails, not just after a quota does

Start with the smallest set of services that meets your requirements. Record commercial-use permission, usage caps, pause conditions, backup and export options, and every optional paid feature. Try a restore or export with non-sensitive test data before depending on the setup.

A measured quota is one reason to upgrade. Required reliability, team access, support or commercial-use permission can justify paying before the free allowance is exhausted. Compare the full cost of the needed plan with the work and disruption of switching. A free plan is useful only when its restrictions fit the project.

Questions

Can I launch a business on Vercel Hobby?

Vercel limits Hobby to personal, non-commercial use. Review the project's purpose, not just whether revenue has started. Choose a plan or hosting provider that permits the intended business use.

Will checking Supabase every two weeks prevent a pause?

No. Supabase may pause Free projects with low activity over seven days. Plan for dashboard restoration and tested backups, or consider a plan without inactivity pausing when availability is required.

Which Cloudflare Workers limit will I hit first?

That depends on your workload. Free has both a daily request allowance and a CPU allowance per invocation. Network waiting is not the same as active CPU execution; measure both request volume and CPU use.

Does a paid open-core project automatically qualify for sponsorship?

No. Docker and GitLab publish non-commercial or non-profit-making requirements in addition to licensing rules. Sentry has its own application. Obtain approval before treating any program as part of a zero-cost budget.

Is Trello Free unlimited for collaborators?

No. Trello's product pricing page lists up to 10 collaborators per Workspace. The conflicting no-user-limit statement on Atlassian's general overview should not be used to plan a larger free team.

Should I always wait until a free quota is exhausted to upgrade?

No. Commercial-use permission, backups, availability, team access and support can matter before traffic grows. Pay only for requirements you can explain, but do not wait for an avoidable service interruption.

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