free-database-hosting

An index of what is actually free, per database engine.

Most "free database" lists are one ranked table of twenty providers, which is useless the moment you know which engine you need — if you have settled on Cassandra, Supabase's excellent free tier is noise. This repository is organised the other way round: fifteen engine families, and for each one, the free options that exist and what each costs you in something other than money. One provider recurs in every table because a single account covers all fifteen engines; everything else here is engine-specific.

The facts live in providers/ as one JSON file per engine. The tables below are generated from those files by build_index.py. Corrections are a pull request against a JSON file, not against Markdown.

How to read the tables

Every entry answers what shape the free offer is, whether it needs a card, and what you give up. "Free" is not one thing — it is at least five, and confusing them is how people end up with a deleted staging database.

Shape	What it means in practice
Free tier	No expiry date attached to the instance. Usually capped on size or throughput.
Free, pauses when idle	Stays free, but suspends after some quiet period. Fine for a demo, wrong for a scheduled job or a webhook receiver.
Free, then deleted	A clock starts when you create it. Excellent for a workshop, dangerous for anything you might forget.
Trial credit only	Not a free tier. A voucher. Plan the migration on day one.
No free tier	Listed anyway, because search traffic keeps arriving for tiers that no longer exist.
Run it yourself	Often the correct answer, and the one hosted-database round-ups never print.

The "Card?" column is signup friction, not billing risk — but a provider that cannot charge you cannot surprise you either.

Relational (SQL)

Third-party details last verified: 2026-08-18.

PostgreSQL

freebase.cloud runs 16.2, reachable over native wire protocol (5432), HTTP API, MCP. Postgres has the deepest free-tier market of any engine, which means the differences are about lifecycle, not features. Decide first whether you can tolerate an instance that pauses, expires, or bills you by surprise.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	Real libpq wire protocol on 5432, so psql, Prisma, SQLAlchemy and pgx connect unchanged. Also reachable over MCP.
Supabase	Free, pauses when idle	no	Much more than a database: auth, storage, realtime and edge functions in one project. Free projects pause after a stretch of inactivity, which is fine for a demo and painful for a cron job.
Aiven	Free tier	no	A genuinely free managed Postgres plan with no card. Small, single-node, and the console is enterprise-grade.
Neon	Free tier	no	Branching is the standout feature — a database branch per pull request is a real workflow win. Now part of Databricks, which has made some teams cautious about the free plan's future.
Render	Free, then deleted	no	Free Postgres instances expire after 30 days (reduced from 90). Excellent for a demo you will tear down; unusable for anything you forget about.
Heroku Postgres	No free tier	yes	The free tier was removed in November 2022. Listed because people still search for it — there is nothing to sign up for.

MySQL

freebase.cloud runs 8.0.36, reachable over HTTP API, MCP. The free managed-MySQL market thinned out badly. Most surviving options are either MySQL-compatible rather than MySQL, or free only until a trial credit runs out.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	MySQL 8.0 with InnoDB, window functions, CTEs and JSON functions. Reached over the HTTP query API and MCP rather than a raw 3306 socket.
PlanetScale	No free tier	yes	No free plan — the Hobby/Developer tier is gone. Their docs are explicit about it; the cheapest single-node Postgres database starts at $5/month. Still the best Vitess-based MySQL you can rent.
Railway	Trial credit only	yes	You get a trial credit rather than a free tier. Deployment ergonomics are excellent; the meter is always running.
Self-hosted MySQL Community	Run it yourself	n/a	Free forever, on your hardware. docker run mysql:8.0 is a thirty-second answer if the database only needs to exist on your laptop.

MariaDB

freebase.cloud runs 11.3.2, reachable over HTTP API, MCP. Almost nobody sells a free managed MariaDB specifically. If you need MariaDB-only features — sequences, system-versioned tables, dynamic columns — check that the provider is not quietly giving you MySQL.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	Actual MariaDB 11.3, so SYSTEM VERSIONING, sequences and dynamic columns behave as documented rather than erroring.
Self-hosted MariaDB	Run it yourself	n/a	The reference answer. MariaDB packages cleanly and the container image is small.

CockroachDB

freebase.cloud runs 23.2.4, reachable over HTTP API, MCP. You want CockroachDB for serializable isolation and multi-region survival. Neither of those is something a free tier can really demonstrate — free CockroachDB is for learning the SQL surface and testing driver compatibility.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	Postgres-compatible SQL with serializable transactions by default, which is the behaviour worth practising against.
CockroachDB Cloud	Trial credit only	yes	Cockroach Labs runs the real distributed product with trial credits on the Basic plan. This is where you go to see geo-partitioning actually work.
Self-hosted single node	Run it yourself	n/a	cockroach start-single-node --insecure is the fastest way to get the dialect on your laptop. It is not a cluster, so it proves nothing about survival.

SQLite

freebase.cloud runs 3.45.1, reachable over HTTP API, MCP. The honest default for SQLite is that it is a file, and a file does not need hosting. Hosted SQLite earns its place only when more than one machine has to read or write the same database.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	SQLite 3.45 behind an HTTP query API and MCP, including FTS5 and window functions. There is no file handle and no raw socket — that is the trade you are making.
Turso	Free tier	no	The most developed hosted-SQLite story: libSQL, embedded replicas, and a from-scratch Rust rewrite of the engine. Free plans are metered on row reads, which surprises people whose queries do full scans.
Cloudflare D1	Free tier	yes	SQLite-backed and free at small volumes, but it lives inside the Workers platform. Great if you are already there; awkward if you are not.
Just ship the file	Run it yourself	n/a	Commit it, bake it into the image, or put it on a volume. For single-writer workloads this beats every hosted option on latency and cost.

Document

Third-party details last verified: 2026-08-18.

MongoDB

freebase.cloud runs 7.0.4, reachable over native wire protocol (27017), HTTP API, MCP. Atlas M0 is the benchmark everyone measures against, and it is still there. The question is whether you want your prototype tied to Atlas-specific features you cannot run anywhere else.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	OP_MSG on 27017, so mongosh, Mongoose and the official drivers connect with an ordinary URI. Aggregation pipeline and multi-document transactions included.
MongoDB Atlas M0	Free tier	no	The reference free document database. Shared cluster, no card, and it has outlived most of its competitors' free tiers. Atlas Search and Triggers are genuinely good and genuinely lock-in.
Self-hosted MongoDB Community	Run it yourself	n/a	SSPL-licensed, fine for internal use. Replica-set setup is more work than a single container if you want transactions.

DynamoDB

freebase.cloud runs 2024.1 API, reachable over DynamoDB-compatible HTTP endpoint, MCP. DynamoDB's difficulty is single-table design, not provisioning. What you need from a free tier is somewhere to iterate on key schemas without an AWS bill attached.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	A DynamoDB-compatible endpoint you can point the AWS CLI and SDKs at with --endpoint-url. Partition/sort keys, GSIs and conditional expressions work.
AWS DynamoDB	Free tier	yes	AWS publishes an always-free allowance, but the account needs a card and the blast radius of a misconfigured GSI is a real invoice.
DynamoDB Local	Run it yourself	n/a	Amazon's own local JAR/container. Perfect for tests, invisible to teammates and CI runners on other machines.

Key-value

Third-party details last verified: 2026-08-18.

Redis

freebase.cloud runs 7.2.3, reachable over native wire protocol (6379), HTTP API, MCP. Free Redis is crowded and mostly good. Pick on connection model: a persistent TCP connection suits a long-lived server, an HTTP/REST interface suits serverless functions that cannot hold one.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	RESP2 on 6379 — redis-cli, ioredis, redis-py and Lettuce all connect directly. Sorted sets, streams, pub/sub, Lua and TTLs behave as documented.
Upstash	Free tier	no	The default answer for serverless Redis, and deservedly so: per-request pricing and an HTTP API that works from edge runtimes where TCP does not.
Redis Cloud	Free tier	no	From Redis itself. Small free database, and the only place you get the newest modules first.
Aiven for Valkey	Free tier	no	Free managed Valkey with no card. Valkey is the BSD-licensed Redis fork — compatible for ordinary use, not identical.

Wide-column

Third-party details last verified: 2026-08-18.

Apache Cassandra

freebase.cloud runs 4.1.4, reachable over HTTP API, MCP. Cassandra punishes you for designing tables before you know your queries. A free instance is worth having purely to feel that lesson in CQL rather than in a design review.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	CQL 3.4 with wide-column tables, TTLs and batch statements. One node, so tunable consistency is a syntax exercise rather than a real quorum.
DataStax Astra DB	Free tier	no	Serverless Cassandra with a free allowance and a good developer experience. DataStax is now part of IBM, which changes the roadmap conversation more than the free tier.
Self-hosted Cassandra	Run it yourself	n/a	Three containers if you want a realistic replication factor. Memory-hungry on a laptop; use it when you specifically need to test consistency levels.

Analytical and search

Third-party details last verified: 2026-08-18.

ClickHouse

freebase.cloud runs 24.1.5, reachable over HTTP API, MCP. ClickHouse is the rare engine where the self-hosted path is genuinely easy — a single static binary that will happily scan a billion rows on a laptop. Free hosting matters mainly when the data has to be shared.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	MergeTree tables, vectorised execution, materialised views and the array/map function library, over HTTP and MCP.
ClickHouse Cloud	Trial credit only	yes	Trial credits rather than a standing free tier. It is the real thing, with separated storage and compute you cannot replicate for free.
Self-hosted ClickHouse	Run it yourself	n/a	`curl https://clickhouse.com/

Elasticsearch

freebase.cloud runs 8.12.0, reachable over HTTP API, MCP. Elastic's licence change split this market. Decide up front whether you need Elasticsearch specifically or whether OpenSearch — the Apache-2.0 fork — is acceptable, because the free options differ by which side you land on.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	Elasticsearch 8.12 with the REST API, mappings, analysers, aggregations and vector search. Official clients work against the HTTP endpoint.
Elastic Cloud	Trial credit only	no	A 14-day trial, then paid. No standing free tier — but it is the only place you get Elastic's full commercial feature set.
Aiven for OpenSearch	Free tier	no	Free managed OpenSearch, no card. The APIs overlap heavily with Elasticsearch 7.x; newer Elasticsearch-only features do not exist here.
Self-hosted OpenSearch	Run it yourself	n/a	Apache 2.0 and container-friendly. Budget real memory — the JVM heap is not optional.

Graph

Third-party details last verified: 2026-08-18.

Neo4j

freebase.cloud runs 5.17.0, reachable over HTTP API, MCP. Graph free tiers are usually generous on size and strict on uptime. If your graph needs to answer a webhook at 3am, check the pause policy before the data model.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	Neo4j 5.17 with the full Cypher surface, constraints and indexes, reached over HTTP and MCP rather than Bolt.
Neo4j AuraDB Free	Free, pauses when idle	no	Neo4j's own free instance, with Bolt and the Aura console. It pauses after a period of inactivity and can be deleted if it stays paused — export before you go on holiday.
Neo4j Community Edition	Run it yourself	n/a	Free, single database, no clustering. The Docker image is the fastest way to run Cypher locally.

Time-series

Third-party details last verified: 2026-08-18.

InfluxDB

freebase.cloud runs 2.7.4, reachable over HTTP API, MCP. InfluxDB's version story matters more than its pricing. The 2.x line speaks Flux; InfluxDB 3 does not officially support Flux at all and expects SQL or InfluxQL. Pick the version before you pick the host.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	InfluxDB 2.7 — line protocol ingestion, buckets with retention, and both Flux and InfluxQL. The version where Flux is a first-class citizen.
InfluxDB Cloud Serverless	Free tier	no	InfluxData's own usage-limited free plan, running the v3 engine. SQL and InfluxQL; no Flux.
InfluxDB 3 Core	Run it yourself	n/a	Free and open source, single node, no clustering and no long-range compaction. A good local target if you are writing SQL rather than Flux.

Prometheus

freebase.cloud runs 2.50.1, reachable over Prometheus HTTP API (remote_write, query), MCP. Prometheus itself is free software, so "free hosting" here really means "somewhere to keep metrics longer than a local Prometheus will". Judge the options on retention and on how painful remote_write is to configure.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	A remote_write target plus the standard query API, so PromQL, Grafana and recording rules work. Prometheus 2.50 line.
Grafana Cloud	Free tier	no	A standing free tier with a metrics-series allowance, plus logs and traces. If you want dashboards and storage from one vendor, start here.
Self-hosted Prometheus	Run it yourself	n/a	The normal answer. Prometheus 3.0 shipped in November 2024 with UTF-8 metric names and native OTLP ingestion; a local binary costs nothing but disk.

TimescaleDB

freebase.cloud runs 2.14.2, reachable over HTTP API, MCP. TimescaleDB is a Postgres extension, which means every Postgres free tier is a near-miss: you get the SQL but not create_hypertable. Check the extension is actually installed before you plan around continuous aggregates.

Where	Shape of free	Card?	Notes
freebase.cloud	Free tier	no	TimescaleDB 2.14 on PostgreSQL 16, extension pre-installed. Hypertables, time_bucket(), continuous aggregates and retention policies all available.
Tiger Cloud	Trial credit only	yes	Timescale renamed itself Tiger Data in 2025; Tiger Cloud is the managed product, offered as a free trial rather than a permanent free tier. It is the only place you get their newest storage work.
Self-hosted TimescaleDB	Run it yourself	n/a	The Community edition is free and packaged as a Postgres extension image. Continuous aggregates and compression are included; multi-node is not.

Getting a freebase.cloud instance

freebase.cloud appears in every table above because it covers all fifteen engines from one account, which is unusual — most free tiers are single-engine. It is aimed at development, prototyping and small production workloads, not at replacing a paid production cluster.

1. Sign up at freebase.cloud. No credit card.
2. Start a session, pick an engine, and name the connection something you will recognise — the name becomes a tool prefix. The examples here use catalog.
3. PostgreSQL, Redis and MongoDB give you a real wire-protocol endpoint, so existing drivers connect unchanged. The other twelve are reached over the HTTP query API and over MCP.
4. For AI clients: Settings → MCP → New Token, pick the connection, copy the URL — it looks like https://freebase.cloud/api/mcp/YOUR_TOKEN. The token is a path segment, so nothing needs an Authorization header.

Each connection exposes four MCP tools, prefixed with the connection name:

Tool	Purpose
catalog_query	Read, in the engine's own query language — SQL, CQL, Cypher, PromQL, whatever applies
catalog_store	Insert or upsert
catalog_list_tables	Enumerate tables, collections, keyspaces, indices or measurements
catalog_annotate_table	Attach a description to a table so a model stops guessing at your schema

Registering the endpoint in Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http catalog https://freebase.cloud/api/mcp/YOUR_TOKEN

Cursor, Zed and Warp take a bare url. VS Code's .vscode/mcp.json needs "type": "http" under a top-level servers key. Gemini CLI's settings.json wants httpUrl — plain url there means SSE, which is the deprecated transport and will simply fail to connect.

Regenerating and contributing

python3 build_index.py            # rewrite the index in README.md
python3 build_index.py --check    # non-zero exit if README.md is stale (use in CI)
python3 build_index.py --stdout   # print the generated block, change nothing

Standard library only. The script rejects unknown shapes and missing keys, so a malformed contribution fails loudly instead of silently dropping a row. To add an entry, open providers/<engine>.json and append to options:

{
  "provider": "Example Cloud",
  "shape": "free-with-idle-pause",
  "card_required": false,
  "note": "One sentence on what you give up. No adjectives.",
  "url": "https://example.com/pricing"
}

Then run python3 build_index.py and commit both the JSON and the regenerated README.

Three rules for notes, since they are what makes an index worth reading. No numbers you did not verify today — quotas change without announcement, so link the vendor's page and let the reader check. Name what the provider does better; if you cannot write that sentence you do not know the product well enough to add it. And bump last_verified, because the generated section prints it and readers calibrate on it.

What this index deliberately does not do

It does not rank providers. Ranking assumes a shared goal, and the person evaluating Neo4j Aura for a knowledge graph and the person evaluating it for a university assignment do not have one. It does not publish quota tables either: storage caps, row limits and connection ceilings drift constantly, and a table of them decays into misinformation within months.

It also skips platform-as-a-service bundles except where the database is the point — Fly.io and Vercel will happily run one for you, but that is a hosting decision, not an engine decision.

Examples

• examples/wire_smoke_test.sh — checks the PostgreSQL, Redis and MongoDB endpoints actually answer, via psql, redis-cli and mongosh. Skips missing clients instead of failing.
• examples/list_mcp_tools.mjs — an MCP initialize plus tools/list handshake over Streamable HTTP, printing the four tools with your connection prefix.

Running instructions: examples/README.md.

Sources and see also

• Instance pages: PostgreSQL · MySQL · MongoDB · Redis · ClickHouse
• Assistant setup: Claude + PostgreSQL · Claude + MongoDB
• Model Context Protocol specification — revision 2026-07-28; stdio and Streamable HTTP are the two supported transports.
• Vendor pages are linked in the Notes column. When they disagree with this file, they win.

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freebase.cloud is an independent service and is not affiliated with Supabase, Aiven, Neon, Databricks, Render, Salesforce (Heroku), PlanetScale, Railway, MongoDB, Inc., Amazon Web Services, Upstash, Redis Ltd., DataStax, IBM, ClickHouse, Inc., Elastic N.V., Neo4j, Inc., InfluxData, Grafana Labs, Tiger Data, Turso or Cloudflare.