Koyeb Closed: 3 Free App Hosting Platforms Without Cold Starts

Quick answer: The Koyeb free tier is closed to new users. Mistral AI announced its acquisition of Koyeb on February 17, 2026, and Koyeb's own FAQ now states the Starter plan "will soon be removed and new users will instead need to subscribe to the Pro, Scale, or Enterprise plan" — Pro starts at $29/month. Existing Starter organizations keep their current terms. If what you actually wanted was free hosting that doesn't sleep, Northflank is the closest like-for-like replacement: its pricing page promises "Always-on-compute – no sleeping :)" on the free Sandbox tier.

For years Koyeb had a specific, unglamorous claim to fame: its free instance stayed running. That made it the standard answer to the most common complaint about free hosting — that Render and friends put your app to sleep the moment nobody visits, so the first request after a quiet hour hangs for a minute. In 2026 that answer expired. Here is exactly what changed, and what is genuinely always-on now.

What Happened to the Koyeb Free Tier

On February 17, 2026, Mistral AI announced it was acquiring Koyeb — the French AI lab's first acquisition, aimed at building out its own cloud. Koyeb's announcement post is blunt about what it means for hobbyists:

New users pay. "The Starter plan will soon be removed and new users will instead need to subscribe to the Pro, Scale, or Enterprise plan." Koyeb's pricing page now lists only Pro ($29/mo, $10 of included compute), Scale ($299/mo, $100 included), and Enterprise.
Existing users are grandfathered. "If you have an existing organization on this plan, nothing will change for you."
The platform isn't shutting down. Koyeb says it "will continue to operate without disruption and will gradually transition to become a core part of Mistral Compute," with the roadmap pointed at inference, sandboxes, and serverless AI workloads rather than general web hosting.

There is a subtlety worth catching, because it's why you'll still find pages insisting the free tier exists. Koyeb's pricing FAQ still documents one free web service per organization — 512 MB RAM, 0.1 vCPU, 2 GB SSD — and still says you are never charged for it. That's true. But the free instance is something included with a plan, and the only plans a new account can start on are paid. The free instance didn't get deleted; the free door to it did. In practice, a new Koyeb account in 2026 costs $29/month.

Does Free Hosting That Doesn't Sleep Still Exist?

Yes — but the list is shorter than it was two years ago, and each survivor asks for a different compromise. Every figure below comes from the provider's own docs or pricing page.

Platform	What's free	Sleeps?	The catch
Northflank	2 services, 1 database, 2 cron jobs	No — "always-on-compute"	Card verified at signup; free-tier build minutes and storage aren't published
Cloudflare Workers	100,000 requests/day	No — nothing to idle	10 ms CPU per request; not a long-running process
Oracle Cloud Always Free	2 OCPU / 12 GB ARM + 2 AMD micro VMs	No — it's a real VPS	Halved in June 2026; you're the sysadmin; card required
Render	750 instance hours/month	Yes — after 15 min idle	~1 minute cold start on the next request
Hugging Face Spaces	2 Gradio Spaces on ZeroGPU + unlimited static	Yes — after 48 hours idle	Since 2026 a Gradio or Docker Space needs a paid plan to create; ZeroGPU is the free exception
Koyeb	Free instance, paid plan only	No	$29/month floor for new accounts
Fly.io	Nothing standing	—	Free allowances retired in 2024; pay-as-you-go, short trial only

Northflank: The Closest Like-for-Like Replacement

If you want the Koyeb deal — push a repo, get a URL, and have it answer instantly at 4 a.m. — Northflank is the one that still offers it. Its pricing page spells the free Sandbox tier out as "2× free services", "1× free database", "2× free cron jobs", and, in its own words, "Always-on-compute – no sleeping :)". That last line is the entire reason this article exists.

A card is verified at signup, but Northflank's FAQ is explicit that verification isn't a charge: "when you enter a card we only verify the card. Your card is only charged at the end of the billing cycle." If you outgrow the Sandbox, the smallest paid compute plan is $2.70/month for 0.1 vCPU and 256 MB — an order of magnitude below Koyeb's new $29 floor.

You can drive the whole thing from the CLI:

npm i -g @northflank/cli
northflank login

One honest gap: Northflank's pricing page doesn't publish the free tier's build minutes or storage allowance, and third-party numbers floating around (500 build minutes, 2 GB) aren't confirmed on any Northflank-owned page. Treat the free tier as "two always-on services and a database," and check your own usage screen for the rest.

The Always-On Options That Aren't a PaaS

Cloudflare Workers sidesteps the sleep problem by not having a container in the first place. The free plan gives 100,000 requests/day across up to 100 Workers, and there is no idle state to wake from. The trade is the execution model: 10 ms of CPU time per request, no persistent process, no background loop. Perfect for APIs, webhooks, redirects, and edge glue; wrong for anything that wants to sit and think.

Oracle Cloud Always Free is still the most raw compute anyone gives away, but it got quietly worse this year. Oracle's own documentation now reads: "All tenancies get the first 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month for free... For Always Free tenancies, this is equivalent to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory." That is exactly half the previous 4 OCPU / 24 GB allowance, effective June 15, 2026, with no blog post and no customer email — people found out when instances stopped. Two AMD VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro instances (1 GB RAM each) are still included on top.

Even halved, a 2-core / 12 GB ARM VM never sleeps and runs whatever you want. If you'd rather not hand-roll deployments on it, install Coolify and you get push-to-deploy and automatic SSL on hardware nobody can reprice out from under you — the most durable answer on this page, in exchange for being your own sysadmin.

What Render's Spin-Down Actually Costs

Render remains the easiest free deploy, and for a portfolio site the sleep is irrelevant. Know the exact mechanics before you rule it in or out. Render's docs state it "spins down a Free web service that goes 15 minutes without receiving any inbound traffic," and spinning back up "takes about one minute," with 750 free instance hours granted per workspace per month.

One minute is survivable for a human clicking a link. It is fatal for anything on a timer or a third-party callback: payment webhooks that retry and give up, Discord and Telegram bots that appear offline, health checks that page you, cron targets that miss their window. That single behaviour is the whole reason "free hosting that doesn't sleep" is a search term at all.

Which One Should You Pick?

You had a Koyeb free app and need a new home: Northflank. Same shape of deal, still always-on.
Your app is an API, webhook, or bot: Cloudflare Workers if it fits in 10 ms of CPU; Northflank if it needs a real process.
You want capacity nobody can shrink: Oracle Always Free plus Coolify. Most work, most control.
It's a demo, portfolio, or side project humans visit: Render. The cold start is a non-issue and the DX is the best of the group.
You're already paying for Koyeb: stay. Nothing breaks, and existing Starter orgs keep their terms.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Koyeb free tier still available in 2026?

Not to new users. Koyeb's FAQ says the Starter plan "will soon be removed and new users will instead need to subscribe to the Pro, Scale, or Enterprise plan," and the pricing page now lists only those three, starting at $29/month. The free instance still exists as an inclusion on paid plans, and existing Starter organizations are unaffected.

Is Koyeb shutting down after the Mistral acquisition?

No. Koyeb says the platform "will continue to operate without disruption" and will become part of Mistral Compute over the coming months. The emphasis is shifting toward AI inference and sandbox workloads, so general-purpose web hosting is unlikely to be the priority it once was.

What is the best free Koyeb alternative that doesn't sleep?

Northflank. Its free Sandbox tier explicitly advertises always-on compute with no sleeping, and includes two services, a database, and two cron jobs. Cloudflare Workers is the better fit for request-driven code, and Oracle Cloud Always Free gives you an always-on VPS if you want to run the stack yourself.

Why do free hosting platforms put apps to sleep?

Because idle containers still hold RAM. Spinning down after inactivity lets a provider oversubscribe hardware and serve far more free accounts per server. Platforms that don't sleep pay for that promise another way — capping requests like Cloudflare, verifying a card like Northflank, or metering CPU-hours like Oracle.

The Verdict

The Koyeb free tier's closure is one data point in a clear trend: Fly.io retired its free allowances in 2024, Oracle halved its ARM instances in June 2026, and Koyeb's went behind a $29/month plan in February. Always-on free compute is the expensive kind to give away, so it's the kind that keeps disappearing. Northflank is the best replacement available today — take it, but don't build anything you can't move again, and keep an Oracle VM or a cheap VPS in mind as the version of "free" that no acquisition can revoke.

If the thing you are keeping awake is an AI agent rather than a web app, the trade-offs change — see free hosting for AI agents for what runs a loop 24/7.