Seven platforms in 2026 will host a Node.js app for free without asking for a credit card.
A WebSocket server, a background worker, and a CPU-heavy handler each fit some free tiers much more comfortably than others. This post will help you match each platform to the kind of Node work it handles well.
Vercel
Vercel Hobby is free for personal, non-commercial projects and is built around HTTP serverless functions and static frontends. Node.js is the primary runtime, and Vercel does a lot of Next.js-specific work for you automatically: caching pages that don't change often, running lightweight functions close to the user, resizing images, and running middleware on every request. Hobby includes 100 GB of bandwidth per month, 1 million function invocations, 4 CPU-hours of Active CPU time, and a 300-second function timeout, which is enough for a real small project.
The tradeoff is architectural because Vercel doesn't run long-lived Node processes on any tier, so anything that needs a persistent WebSocket connection, a background worker, or a queue consumer isn't what Vercel is designed for. For a Next.js frontend with a handful of API routes, no other platform on this list wires up as much of the framework for you automatically.
