The free-tier traps that catch new developers
Non-commercial terms, idle pausing, daily caps and hard stops. What each one means, which services have them, and how to plan around them.
· 2 min read
Free tiers are generous enough to launch on. The surprises come from the small print: rules about what you can use the plan for, what happens when nobody visits, and what happens when you hit a limit. These are the patterns worth knowing before you pick a stack. Every example below was checked against the provider's own pricing pages.
1. Free, but not for anything that makes money
Some free plans are for personal projects only. Vercel's Hobby plan is the best-known example: its fair use guidelines restrict it to non-commercial, personal use. If your project takes payments, runs ads or is part of a business, you need Vercel Pro, which is $20 a month per deploying seat.
Plan for it: decide early whether your project is commercial. In the stack builder, turning on Makes money removes non-commercial plans from every estimate.
2. Pauses when nobody uses it
A free project that goes quiet can be switched off. Supabase pauses free projects after a week of inactivity, and you have to restore them before they work again. Neon's free plan suspends the database after five minutes without queries and wakes it on the next one, which adds a short delay to that first request.
Plan for it: an idle pause is fine for a prototype, awkward for a portfolio piece someone opens once a month, and wrong for anything with real users.
3. A daily cap that runs out before the monthly one
Resend's free plan sends 3,000 emails a month, but no more than 100 in a day. Launch day, a batch of sign-ups or one bulk notification can hit the daily cap while the monthly allowance looks untouched. Paid Resend plans have no daily limit.
Plan for it: look for daily limits, not just monthly ones. The builder checks daily caps against a busy day, assumed to be twice an average one.
4. Stops at the limit instead of billing
A hard stop protects you from surprise bills, but it also means your app stops working. On Netlify's credit-based Free plan, projects pause when the 300 monthly credits run out, and if one project goes over, every project on the account pauses. Supabase's free database becomes read-only above 500 MB.
Plan for it: a hard cap is a feature while you are experimenting. Once people rely on your app, you usually want a plan that bills a little extra rather than one that goes offline.
5. Credits instead of plain units
Netlify bills in credits: a production deploy uses 15, a gigabyte of bandwidth 20, and 10,000 web requests 2. Credits make it harder to see what a month will cost, because everything draws from one pool. Twenty production deploys alone use the whole Free allowance.
Plan for it: convert credits back into the things you actually do (deploys, traffic) before comparing plans. The builder does this for you.
The pattern
None of these make a free tier bad. They make it a different product from the paid plan. Pick free plans knowing which trap applies, and know which upgrade you will need first.