Postgres on Fly.io is now free for small projects. The hard part about free Postgres is storage, so this post is also about free storage. Read about it here, or try us out first. You can be up and running in just a few minutes.

We like building side projects and also hate paying for hosting for side projects. We also know that y’all like free stuff. And we think that when you use free stuff for side projects, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll pay for similar stuff for real work.

We’ve had a free tier since we launched ten years ago (in 2020). Until today, our free tier covered a little bit of CPU time, a little bit of RAM, and a little bit of bandwidth. We didn’t include storage.

There’s a good reason for this. CPU, RAM, and bandwidth are easy. It costs almost nothing to keep a process idling. It’s easy to migrate application processes. And, importantly, it’s easy to bounce back when hardware goes poof. These things are easy because there’s almost no state involved. An application process that stops and starts fresh on different hardware continues to be valuable.

Your enormous database of sandwiches is different, though.

Stored data occupies space all the time, though, whether your app is running or not. Recovering data from hardware failure means you have to be storing it with