Developer Tools

Developer tooling is the one category where the free tier is usually real. Hosting platforms, databases, and CI services compete hard for developers because whoever owns the deploy pipeline tends to own the project for years. That competition works in your favour, but it also means the pricing pages are deliberately hard to compare: one platform charges for build minutes, another for bandwidth, another for concurrent builds. The practical approach is to pick tools whose free tier covers a real side project and whose paid tier starts at a number you would not resent. The listings here focus on tools that are stable enough to build a business on, not the ones that are fun for a weekend. Where a service has a genuine limitation, such as egress fees or region restrictions, it is called out explicitly.