What is stack-on-a-budget?

Stack on a Budget is a curated reference list of online services that offer meaningful free tiers, aimed at developers who want to build and run applications without paying for every piece of infrastructure. The premise is that many well-known platforms give away enough capacity on their free plans to support small apps, side projects, and even early-stage production systems. The list is organized into roughly 40 categories. App hosting options include Netlify, Vercel, Render, Fly, and Google App Engine. Database hosting covers managed PostgreSQL options like Supabase and Neon, along with MongoDB Atlas, Firebase, Redis Cloud, and several others. There are also sections for email delivery services, continuous integration pipelines, content delivery networks, monitoring and alerting tools, code coverage services, and authentication providers, among many more. Each entry describes what the service does and what its free tier actually includes, so a developer can quickly decide whether a service fits their needs without digging through a provider's pricing page. The stated goal is to include enough detail that a reader can make a decision based on the description alone, without having to visit the service's website first. This is not a software package and contains no runnable code. It is a reference document maintained through community contributions on GitHub, with documented guidelines for what counts as a meaningful free tier before a new entry is accepted. The project is sponsored by Mockoon, a tool for building mock APIs.