Render — source summary
Render's official site + free-tier docs, fetched 2026-06-09 (the /pricing page is JS-rendered and
yielded no concrete numbers; the /docs/free page is the substantive source for the figures
below). URL-only ingest. A managed PaaS in the Heroku lineage — contrast partner to raw IaaS
(hetzner-cloud) and sibling of railway / fly-io.
What it is
A managed Platform-as-a-Service deploying static sites, web services, private services, background workers, cron jobs, and managed Postgres + Key Value stores — abstracting infra behind git push, with zero-downtime deploys, Infrastructure-as-Code, and preview environments. Render publishes head-to-head comparisons against Heroku, Vercel, and Railway (it competes in managed deployment, not against bare IaaS).
Free tier (re-verified 2026-09-22, unchanged since 2026-06-09)
- Static sites: free to deploy.
- Free web services: 750 free instance hours per workspace per calendar month; Render spins a free service down after 15 minutes with no inbound traffic (≈1 min to spin back up). Filesystem changes are lost on every redeploy; no persistent disks; SMTP ports blocked.
- Free Postgres: expires 30 days after creation, fixed 1 GB, one active per workspace, 14-day grace to upgrade before deletion.
- Free Key Value: ephemeral (data lost on restart), one per workspace.
- Free instances live in the Hobby workspace plan (up to 25 services).
- Spin-downs do not consume free hours — the 750 hours meter running time, not wall-clock.
- Free services still draw on the workspace's monthly bandwidth and build-pipeline minutes; free is free of instance cost, not of every meter. Exceeding those bills (if a card is on file) or suspends the service.
- Render's own instruction on the tier is blunt: "Do not use them for production applications."
Paid pricing not captured — concrete Starter/Pro instance and paid-Postgres prices weren't in the fetched pages (JS-rendered pricing table). Flagged for a future fetch; not back-filled from memory.
Positioning
The "free-but-it-sleeps" model: generous enough for hobby/preview workloads, with spin-down and DB-expiry as the upsell pressure — a different free-tier shape from oracle-cloud-free's permanent Always Free allowance. See synthesis.
Related
railway · fly-io · hetzner-cloud · oracle-cloud-free
Re-tiered 2026-08-21 → T1. Under the corpus rule (../QUALITY.md → tier by the claim, not the URL), this page rests on Render's own free-tier documentation. Terms, quotas and spin-down behaviour, all set by Render — including the instruction "Do not use them for production applications," which is the vendor limiting its own offer rather than selling it. A pricing page hidden behind JS rendering is a fetch problem, not a provenance one.