ripienaar/free-for-dev
Free-for-dev is a crowd-maintained directory listing hundreds of cloud services and software tools that offer permanently free plans for developers and infrastructure teams. With contributions from over 2,000 people, it covers everything from hosting and storage to monitoring and security tools — all vetted to ensure the free tier is genuine and long-lasting, not just a trial.
§ 1 — why it matters
For founders and builders, this resource can dramatically cut early-stage costs by surfacing legitimate free tiers across the entire software stack, reducing the need to pay for tools before achieving product-market fit. With nearly 143,000 stars on GitHub, it also signals just how much demand exists for cost-effective infrastructure options — a clear indicator of where builders are feeling budget pressure.
§ 2 — why it’s trending
With over 4,400 new stars this week alone on a repo that already has 128,000, free-for.dev is clearly hitting a nerve right now — likely because tightening budgets are pushing more builders to hunt down every free tier they can find before reaching for a credit card. The project's 80 commits in the last 30 days show it's actively maintained and growing, not just coasting on its reputation. It's the kind of resource that gets rediscovered and reshared every time the "how do I build this without spending money" conversation spikes, and right now that conversation is everywhere.
§ 3 — also rising in infrastructure & devops this week
- prometheus/prometheusPrometheus is an open-source monitoring system that continuously tracks the health and performance of software applications and infrastructure by collecting and storing measurable data points over time, like server response speeds or error rates. It includes a built-in query language and alerting system so teams can spot problems, visualize trends, and get notified when something goes wrong before users notice.+589 stars this week
- stackryze/FreeDomainsFreeDomains is an open-source project that lets anyone claim a free web address (domain name) for their website or app without paying the typical annual registration fees. It's essentially a free alternative to paid domain registrars like GoDaddy, designed for developers, hobbyists, and anyone running small projects or home servers.+489 stars this week
- henrygd/beszelBeszel is a lightweight tool that lets you monitor the health and performance of your servers and the software running on them, all through a simple web dashboard. It tracks things like processing power usage, memory, storage, and network activity — including for individual containerized apps — and sends alerts when something looks wrong.+430 stars this week
- QuantumNous/new-apiNew API is a self-hosted control center that lets teams connect to multiple AI providers — like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic — through a single unified interface, while managing who has access, how much they're spending, and which AI model handles which request. Think of it as a router and dashboard for AI services that you run on your own infrastructure instead of relying on a third-party middleman.+383 stars this week
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building on this data? the catalog and the indexes are also an api — developers →