Free Tools & Hosting for Starters

When starting a new project (whether it is an AI application, mobile app, web app, or data engineering pipeline), cost shouldn’t be a barrier. Below is a curated list of free and limited tiers that allow you to build, deploy, and showcase your projects for free.

1. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) & AI

Building a RAG app requires an LLM provider, a Vector Database, and an orchestration framework.

  • Groq Cloud: Offers free API access to state-of-the-art models like Llama 3, Gemma, and Mixtral with high rate limits. Perfect for local prototyping.

  • Pinecone: Provides a free starter index with up to 2GB storage, which is more than enough for thousands of document embeddings.

  • Qdrant Cloud: Offers a free tier cluster with 1GB of RAM, supporting advanced hybrid and vector search.

  • Cohere: Free developer keys for embeddings and Rerank APIs, very useful for enhancing RAG retrieval accuracy.

  • Hugging Face Spaces: Host your Python RAG demos (built with Streamlit, Gradio, or Chainlit) for free on standard CPU instances.

2. Mobile App Dev

Developing mobile applications (e.g., using React Native or Flutter) requires builds and backend services.

  • Expo EAS (Expo Application Services): Free build tier to compile your React Native apps into Android (.apk/.aab) and iOS (.ipa) binaries without needing a powerful local machine or Mac.

  • Supabase: 2 free projects with a full PostgreSQL database, built-in Authentication, File Storage (up to 1GB), and Realtime capabilities.

  • Firebase (Spark Plan): Free hosting, Authentication, Cloud Firestore (NoSQL database), and Cloud Storage. Excellent integration with mobile frameworks.

3. Web App Dev

Deploying web frontends and backends.

  • Vercel: The best platform for hosting React, Next.js, and static websites. Includes a free hobby tier with automatic CI/CD from GitHub.

  • Netlify: Free tier for static websites and serverless functions, featuring instant rollbacks and form handling.

  • Render: Free tier for hosting web services (Node.js, Python, Go, Rust), static sites, and PostgreSQL databases (note: free servers spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity).

  • GitHub Pages: Completely free hosting for static sites (pure HTML/JS or built sites like single page apps) directly from GitHub repos.

4. Data Engineering

Ingesting, storing, and transforming data.

  • MotherDuck: Free serverless DuckDB in the cloud. Includes 10GB of storage and makes querying local or remote files fast using analytical SQL.

  • Google BigQuery Sandbox: No credit card required. Gives you 10GB of active storage and 1TB of query processing per month.

  • Mage.ai / Airbyte (Local): Open-source pipelines that you can run locally for free to orchestrate and ingest data.

5. Data Visualisation

Creating and sharing dashboards.

  • Streamlit Community Cloud: Connects to your GitHub repository and deploys your Streamlit Python dashboards for free.

  • Looker Studio: Free to use with native Google connectors (Google Sheets, BigQuery, Google Analytics) to design interactive dashboards.

  • Tableau Public: Free service to publish and share Tableau visualizations publicly.

  • Gradio: Free deployment of interactive machine learning interfaces directly on Hugging Face Spaces.