Free PostgreSQL Hosting and Free Docker Hosting in 2026

It sleeps. The first request after a quiet spell takes a while, or fails, while the service wakes.

It expires. The database or the whole account is deleted on a date you did not choose, sometimes with a grace period, sometimes without.

It asks for a card. The free tier is real, but you cannot reach it without giving payment details, and overage is then a bill rather than a stop.

None of these is dishonest. They are how anyone pays for hardware they give away. The trick is to know which ending you are signing up for, and to match it to the job. Everything below was read from the vendors' own pages when we checked, and free tiers change, so date-stamp your own decision too.

Run any free tier, and any free PostgreSQL hosting offer in particular, past these six questions before you build on it.

• Does it sleep, and how long does waking take? A five-minute idle timer is fine for a hobby app and painful for a webhook.
• Does it expire? A permanent free plan and a 30-day free database are different things, even with the same price.
• Is a card required? No-card tiers are safer to try. Card-on-file tiers are safer from spam and worse for surprise bills.
• Are there backups? A free database with no backups is a scratchpad. Treat it that way.
• What is the size cap, and what happens at it? Some tiers stop writes, some suspend the service, some start charging.
• Can you leave? Standard Postgres and a plain Docker image move anywhere. Check the export route before you need it.

Neon is the one to try first if you want free PostgreSQL hosting that does not expire. Its pricing page calls the Free plan permanent, with no card. You get 0.5GB per project, 100 CU-hours and 10 branches. Compute goes idle after five minutes and that timer cannot be turned off on Free. The restore window is six hours. We cover the paid side in our Neon review.

Supabase Free is a fuller backend: Postgres, auth for up to 50,000 monthly active users, and 1GB of file storage, on up to two active projects. The limit that bites is inactivity. Projects are paused after one week without use, and free-tier users export their own data, because automatic backups start on Pro.

Aiven's free PostgreSQL plan gives a dedicated small machine with 1GB of RAM, 1GB of storage and automated backups, with no card and no time limit. It powers off after a period of inactivity, and you are emailed first. It is a single node, with documentation-only support.

Render Postgres is the cautionary one. It is easy to set up, and it ends.

After a 14-day grace period Render deletes the database and its data. Free instances hold 1GB and have no backups. It works for a month-long tutorial and for nothing you mean to keep.

Real free docker hosting is rarer than free PostgreSQL hosting, because always-on compute costs more than a small database. What exists is credits, trials and metered allowances. Free container hosting mostly means a trial.

Google Cloud Run has the most generous permanent allowance for containers: 2 million requests, 180,000 vCPU-seconds and 360,000 GiB-seconds each month, according to Google's free-tier page. The allowance is pooled across projects on one billing account. The catch is that a billing account is required even for the free tier, and there is no database in the allowance.

Render Free runs a web service for 750 instance hours a month. It spins down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic and takes about a minute to come back. There are no persistent disks and no SSH.

Fly.io is the shortest. Its trial is 2 hours of machine runtime or 7 days, whichever comes first, and trial machines stop after five minutes. Fly's own docs put the catch in one line: adding a card ends the free trial, and billing then starts. That makes it a good way to try a deployment and a poor way to host anything.

The Trial is our own free tier, so weigh it with that in mind. It needs no card and no email. You get one Product with one environment, and the full API, CLI and MCP surface, which is the reason it exists: an agent can start a workspace and try the whole platform with no account. Postgres, auth, storage and a custom domain are all available for the trial's 72 hours.

Then it ends. The trial expires after 72 hours, and it has no backups. Compute on shared tiers sleeps when idle by default, so a quiet service wakes on its next request. If you want something that keeps running for nothing, Neon and Cloud Run are the better answers, and we say so. The trial is for finding out whether the platform fits before you pay our lowest plan.

You can start one from the start page. What the trial does not do is hold your data. Move anything you care about within three days.

Sometimes for a small internal tool, rarely for anything with paying users. A free PostgreSQL hosting plan usually has no high availability, no support, few or no backups, and a vendor with every right to change the terms. The vendors say as much: Aiven describes its plan as built for prototyping, learning and small projects.

If you do run something real on free PostgreSQL hosting, take your own dumps on a schedule and keep them somewhere else. Our guide to backing up and restoring a PostgreSQL database has the commands. Then test one restore. A free tier with a tested restore is a fair place to start. A free tier with none is a countdown.

• Free PostgreSQL hosting that should still exist next year: Neon Free or Aiven Free, with your own dumps.
• A backend with auth for a side project you will visit weekly: Supabase Free, and unpause it when you return.
• A container that must cost nothing when idle: Google Cloud Run, if you are content with a billing account.
• A weekend tutorial: Render, knowing it ends in 30 days.
• A throwaway trial of a whole stack, no card: the Helm7 Trial.

Paid Docker hosting comes next. Our comparison of the best Docker hosting providers starts where this one leaves off.