The Free-Tier Myths That Are Costing Developers Money in 2026 A surprising number of deployment guides still circulating online describe free hosting tiers that no longer exist in their original form. Railway's once-famous free trial has shifted to a small monthly credit model. Fly.io's "three free VMs forever" is now a legacy-only perk, with new users getting a short trial before pay-as-you-go billing kicks in. Vercel's free Hobby plan is explicitly restricted to personal, non-commercial projects — a detail easy to miss until a client project gets flagged. Meanwhile, Netlify has moved to a credit-based system that charges differently for builds, bandwidth, and compute. None of this makes these platforms bad choices; it just means developers budgeting a project's hosting costs based on outdated blog posts are in for a surprise. Verifying current pricing directly against each platform's documentation before committing is now a non-negotiable step. Read the verified, up-to-date platform pricing comparison → https://apidots.com/blog/deploy-claude-code-app-platforms/