Free Java hosting: the free tiers that still exist and their limits

Free Java hosting still exists, but it looks very different from the days of free servlet accounts. Today you get a slice of a container platform, a monthly usage allowance, or a small virtual machine you manage yourself. Each comes with a catch: the app sleeps, the credit runs out, or a card is required to prove you are a real person. Figures checked in November 2026.

Free tiers that still exist

Each provider name links to the official page the figures come from. A dash means that page does not state it.

What the free numbers mean in practice

Usage credits are hard to read until you turn them into hours. Google Cloud Run's request-based allowance of 180,000 vCPU-seconds equals 50 hours of one full vCPU per month, and 360,000 GiB-seconds equals 100 hours at 1 GiB. Because request-based billing counts only the time your containers handle requests, a hobby API with light traffic can stay inside that for a whole month. A busy one will not.

Railway's $1 monthly credit is smaller than it looks. At Railway's rate of roughly $10 per GB of RAM per month, a service holding 0.5 GB costs about $5 a month for memory alone, so $1 covers around six days of continuous running before CPU is even counted. Treat it as a sandbox for testing deploys, not a place to host a Java app free all month.

Render's 750 hours per workspace are enough to keep one service up for a full calendar month, but it will not stay up: the free tier spins down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic. Northflank works the other way around. Its Sandbox covers up to $20 of resources a month, and the 0.5 vCPU / 1 GB size that costs $12 on the paid plan fits inside that, with no sleep.

Sleep, cold starts and the JVM

A sleeping app is fine for a portfolio project. It is painful for anything users rely on. When a request reaches a stopped Render or Koyeb instance, the platform has to start the container, and then the JVM has to boot and load your framework. Render puts the spin-up at about one minute. A Spring Boot app adds its own startup time on top.

You can shorten the wait. Smaller dependency trees start faster, and frameworks built for fast startup, such as Quarkus or Micronaut, help on platforms that scale to zero. If cold starts are the deciding factor, pick a tier that does not sleep: Northflank Sandbox, Oracle Always Free, or Azure F1 within its daily CPU cap.

Oracle Always Free: the most memory, the most work

Oracle's offer is the largest by far. The Arm allowance of 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month adds up to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of RAM, available for the life of the account in your home region, with 10 TB of outbound data a month. That is enough for a JVM, a database and a reverse proxy on one machine.

There are three costs. You need a credit or debit card at sign-up for verification. You run the server yourself: install a JDK, open firewall ports, set up a service and keep the OS patched. And Oracle may reclaim instances that look idle, measured over seven days, when CPU (95th percentile), network and memory use for Arm instances all stay under 20%. Which JDK to install there matters less than people think; the OpenJDK vs Oracle JDK guide covers the license side.

Free Tomcat hosting

If you have a WAR file instead of a fat JAR, your options narrow. Azure App Service offers a managed Tomcat stack, and the F1 Free plan is the no-cost entry to App Service, with 1 GB of RAM and 60 CPU minutes a day; confirm the stack is selectable for F1 in your region when you create the plan. Everywhere else, free Tomcat hosting means packaging Tomcat yourself: a Dockerfile that starts from an official Tomcat image and copies your WAR into webapps/ runs on Render, Koyeb, Northflank or Cloud Run. On Oracle's VM you download Tomcat and run it as a service. Version choices are covered on the Tomcat hosting page.

Free tiers that are gone

Several names still appear in older lists of free Java hosting, and none of them give a free tier to new users now:

• Fly.io: new organizations get no free tier or monthly free allowance, only a trial of $1 credit for seven days. Paid machines start at $2.19 a month for 256 MB.
• Heroku: no free plan. Eco costs $5 a month and sleeps after 30 minutes; Basic is $7.
• DigitalOcean App Platform: free only for up to three static sites. A Java container starts at $5 a month for 512 MiB.
• AWS App Runner: closed to new customers since April 30, 2026. AWS points new users to Amazon ECS Express Mode.

AWS still has a free offer at account level: $100 in credits at sign-up and up to $100 more for exploring services, for a maximum of $200 over six months. After that, the account closes unless you move to the paid plan.

Which free option to pick

To host a Java app free for learning or a demo, Render is the simplest: connect a repository with a Dockerfile and it builds. If you want it awake around the clock without paying, Northflank's Sandbox is the cleanest choice, and Oracle Always Free is the one with real room to grow. When the app gets users, the first paid tiers are cheap; the full Java hosting comparison lists them, and the deployment guide shows the steps for a container platform and a plain VM.

Clever Cloud sits outside the free list on purpose. It has no free tier, but it gives sign-up credits without a card, and its smallest Java instance with 256 MiB costs about EUR 4.56 a month.

Sources

1. render.com/docs/free
2. render.com/pricing
3. railway.com/pricing
4. koyeb.com/docs/reference/instances
5. cloud.google.com/run/pricing
6. azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-service/linux
7. docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm
8. oracle.com/cloud/free
9. northflank.com/pricing
10. aws.amazon.com/free
11. aws.amazon.com/apprunner
12. fly.io/docs/about/pricing
13. heroku.com/pricing
14. digitalocean.com/pricing/app-platform
15. clever.cloud/pricing