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.
Cloudflare
DNS, CDN, and a surprising amount of infrastructure for free.
Cursor
A code editor built around a model that can see your repo.
Docker
The default way to package and run software.
GitHub
Where code lives, and increasingly where it ships.
Neon
Postgres with branching, billed by usage.
Postman
API client that grew into a collaboration platform.
Railway
Push a repo, get a running service with a database.
Sentry
Error tracking that tells you which release broke it.
Supabase
Postgres with auth, storage, and realtime attached.
Vercel
Deploy a frontend in one command, with previews for every branch.
Visual Studio Code
The editor most developers end up in.
Datadog
Metrics, logs, and traces in one place, billed by volume.
CircleCI
Hosted CI that splits a test suite across containers.
Auth0
Drop-in authentication with the identity providers already attached.
Temporal
Durable execution for workflows that must survive a crash.
Upstash
Serverless Redis and Kafka, billed by the request.
No tools in this category match that filter.
Guides in Developer Tools
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