Plan a stack
How the planner turns your needs, constraints and expected usage into a zero-cost stack.
The planner picks one official free plan for each thing your project needs. It is deterministic: the same request gives the same plan on the website, in the API and in your agent.
Needs
Choose a preset (SaaS app, AI app, static site, API backend, mobile backend) or individual needs, grouped by category: hosting, compute, databases, cache and queues, storage, CDN and DNS, auth, email, realtime and push, AI models, vector, search, observability, CI/CD and analytics.
Constraints
| Setting | Effect |
|---|---|
| It will make money | Rules out plans that are non-commercial only. |
| No card at sign-up | Rules out plans that need a payment card. |
| No phone or ID check | Rules out plans that need a phone number, an ID check or a registered business. |
| Never pauses when idle | Rules out plans that pause inactive projects. |
| No training on my data | Rules out model APIs whose free tier trains on your inputs. |
| Where are your users? | Mainland China rules out blocked services and flags ICP filing and reachability risks. |
Expected usage
Usage figures are optional. When you add them, each pick is compared with its free limits:
- Monthly active users are compared with user limits for auth, realtime messaging and push notifications.
- Requests per month are compared with request limits for hosting, functions and CDNs; daily quotas count as 30 days.
- Database size and file storage are compared separately, so a plan that bundles both is checked against each.
- Bandwidth, emails and AI tokens per month are compared with the matching limits.
The tightest matching limit wins. When a plan pays for several uses from one balance of credits (Netlify, Cloudinary), your figures on that balance add up: storing 5 GB and serving 10 GB on 25 credits that each buy 1 GB of either uses 60% of it. A plan you would outgrow is marked over the limit and is no longer counted as $0.
Reading the results
- Verdict: $0 a month when every need has a free plan with no end date that fits your usage; otherwise Not fully free yet, with the reasons.
- Fit: a 0–100 score from neutral factors. It ranks plans for the same need; it is not a grade of the provider.
- Reasons and risks: why a plan was chosen, and what to watch, from most to least serious.
- Headroom: how much of each free limit your stated usage would use.
- Alternatives and ruled out: other plans for the same need, and plans your constraints excluded, each with the reason.
How ranking works
Plans earn points for being free with no end date, being unable to bill you, never pausing, needing no card, allowing commercial use and fitting your usage. Pauses, deletion, identity checks, unknown terms and stale records cost points. Plans their provider is retiring rank after every plan that stays open. Money is never an input. The full rules are in the methodology.