Why this comparison
When I started building Sa, a car comparison platform for the Indian market, I had a working .NET Core Web API with MongoDB running locally — Makes and Models endpoints, Swagger docs, all good. Then came the question every side-project developer eventually hits: where do I deploy this for free?
Azure and AWS have free tiers, but they come with credit card requirements, complex IAM setup, and cold-start behavior that isn't beginner-friendly for a side project you're iterating on daily. So I evaluated four alternatives that are actually built for indie developers.
The options
Railway
