There are plenty of SaaS products now, and many of them are offering free plan or free tier. Sometimes completely free. Those free plans typically have limited capacity, but often enough for side projects.

I curated SaaS products which offer useful free-plan. Use them to launch your side project rapidly, with a tiny budget. Pay for them only when your project gets on fire. They are really great products.

Selection

I picked only one product for each category so that you can easily know where to go. As a result, many good alternative products are omitted. Some category, such as project management, access analytics or exception tracking have so many competitive products. You can easily find them by just googling.

Some category has far famous product, like GitHub for code hosting, but I didn’t select if they are offering free plan only for OSS or non-profits. Free trials for a limited period are also excluded.

Hosting

Say good-bye to server management.

• CloudFlare: for DNS, SSL, CDN, attack protection
• Heroku: for dynamic websites (application and database server)
• GitHub Pages: for static websites
• IronWorker: for cron and task queueing
• Wistia: for video hosting
• Cloudinary: for image hosting
• Mailgun: for transactional email
• Zoho Mail: for custom domain email

Features

You don’t have to implement by yourself.

• Disqus: for comment form
• Typeform: for form
• Orankl: for customer reviews
• Algolia: for search engine
• Mapbox: for map
• Help Scout: for help desk
• Olark: for customer chat
• OneLogin: for single sign-on
• Microsoft Translator: for machine translation

Development & Testing

Improve code quality and stability.

• Bitbucket: for code hosting
• Codacy: for code review
• Codeship: for continuous integration
• Loader.io: for load testing
• Mailtrap: for email testing
• Detectify: for security scan

Monitoring

Monitoring by third party is more reliable.

• Pingdom: for uptime monitoring
• New Relic: for performance monitoring
• Datadog: for infrastructure monitoring
• Rollbar: for exception management
• PaperTrail: for log management

Analytics

See what users are doing.

• Mixpanel: for user behavior analysis
• Keen.io: for in-depth tracking
• Intercom: for customer analysis
• Google Analytics: for user acquisition analysis
• Google Web Master Tools: for search engine report
• Optimizely: for A/B testing

Collaboration

Great if you’re working as team.

• Slack: for team chat
• Trello: for task management
• InVision: for design mockup
• Google Docs: for documents sharing

Marketing

Deliver your product to wider audience.

• Mailchimp: for email marketing
• Medium: for blog marketing
• Twitter: for user communication
• Buffer: for social network management
• Product Hunt: for launch event
• StackExchange: for Q&A

So, what’s not free?

It seems almost all building blocks of web service are free. But these awesome services are unfortunately not offering free plan.

• Authy: for 2-factor authentication
• Twilio: for SMS
• StatusPage.io: for status page
• ReadMe.io: for API documentation
• Stripe: for payment (costs only when transaction happens)
• EasyPost: for shipping real goods (costs per usage)

I listed them because some services actually need these features. Consider paying for them if you need and have some budget.

Other Free Resources

• You can get free domain name with Freenom, but the selection is limited. On Heroku and Github Pages, you can use their subdomain for free.
• You can use Awesome Free Things as well to develop your project.

Because most of these free plans are a subset of paid plan, the quality is assured. The best thing about using quality SaaS is you can develop faster and better than implementing everything by yourself.

You’ll also learn a lot from those awesome products, seeing their brilliant solutions for each specific problem.