Data note
Render Free vs Starter in 2026: a $0 service that sleeps, or $7 that does not
Render Free sleeps after 15 minutes idle and takes about a minute to wake; Starter is $7 a month and never sleeps. What each one includes in 2026.
Render's Free web service costs $0 but spins down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic and takes about 1 minute to wake, while the Starter instance at $7 a month stays up and adds a 0.5 CPU / 512 MB allocation. The $7 Starter tier is the first paid step in Render's ladder, and the jump to the next size is $25 for 1 CPU and 2 GB.
- Render's Free web service costs $0 and spins down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic, waking in about 1 minute on the next request (checked 2026-10-25).
- A Render workspace gets 750 Free instance hours per calendar month, and spun-down services do not consume them (checked 2026-10-25).
- The Starter instance is 0.5 CPU and 512 MB for $7 a month and runs continuously, with no idle spin-down (checked 2026-10-25).
- Free includes 5 GB of workspace bandwidth and 500 build minutes a month, with extra bandwidth at $0.15 per GB and extra builds at $5 per 1,000 minutes (checked 2026-10-25).
- Free web services cannot attach a persistent disk, scale past 1 instance, or use SSH, one-off jobs or edge caching (checked 2026-10-25).
- Free Postgres gives 1 GB of storage and expires 30 days after creation, and the paid database ladder starts at $6 a month (checked 2026-10-25).
3 primary sources · If this is out of date, tell us and we will re-measure.
On this page
Render's cheapest two options are not the same product at different prices. The Free web service is $0 and disappears after 15 minutes of quiet, while the Starter instance is $7 a month and behaves like a server. Between them sit the things that decide most small projects: cold starts, a persistent disk, SSH access and a working database. The figures below come from Render's pricing page and its free-tier documentation, both read on 2026-10-25.
Free versus Starter, line by line
| Item | Free | Starter at $7 a month |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $7, prorated to the second |
| Allocation | 512 MB, less than 1 CPU | 0.5 CPU, 512 MB |
| Idle behaviour | spins down after 15 minutes | always running |
| Cold start | about 1 minute | none |
| Instance hours | 750 per workspace per month | unlimited, billed hourly |
| Bandwidth included | 5 GB per workspace | 5 GB on the Hobby workspace |
| Build minutes | 500 per workspace | 500 on the Hobby workspace |
| Persistent disk | not available | $0.25 per GB per month |
| Instances | 1, cannot scale | manually scalable |
| SSH, shell, one-off jobs | not available | available |
| Custom domains | 2 on the Hobby workspace | 2 on the Hobby workspace |
Both rows are governed by the Hobby workspace, which is $0 a month plus compute. Render waives the workspace fee in a month with no services and no activity, so a single Starter service on Hobby costs exactly $7 plus whatever bandwidth exceeds 5 GB.
What the sleep timer actually means
Fifteen minutes is shorter than most people assume. A service that gets one visitor every 20 minutes is asleep every time that visitor arrives, which means every page view in a low-traffic app pays roughly a minute of cold start. WebSocket messages count as inbound traffic, so a chat app with a connected client stays awake; a documentation site with real readers does not.
The 750-hour allowance is more generous than it looks and less generous than it sounds. Two always-on Free services would need 1,440 hours in a 30-day month, so a workspace can keep exactly one Free service awake around the clock and still run out — the hours are meant for services that actually sleep. When they run out, every Free web service in the workspace is suspended until the next month, and the balance does not roll over.
The database is the part that ends most Free experiments. Free Postgres is 1 GB and expires 30 days after creation, with a 14-day grace period and no backups, so an app that lives on Free for a quarter has to move its data twice: once off the expired database and once onto something with a bill attached.
How we measured it
Three Render pages were fetched on 2026-10-25: the pricing page for the compute ladder, the free-tier docs for spin-down behaviour, instance hours and blocked features, and the compute-plan docs to confirm that Starter is the current name for the 0.5 CPU / 512 MB instance. No service was deployed and no cold start was timed — the one-minute figure is Render's own, and every derived number, such as 750 hours being 31.25 days, is marked as calculated.
What changes in practice
Paying $7 does not buy more RAM, because Starter and Free are both 512 MB. It buys continuity, a disk and a shell. That distinction matters when people upgrade expecting a faster app and instead get a warmer one: the win is that the first request after lunch no longer takes a minute, not that the app computes faster.
The upgrade also unlocks the operational features that make a service debuggable. SSH and one-off jobs mean you can run a migration against the live environment, and a persistent disk at $0.25 per GB per month means uploaded files survive a deploy. Neither is available on Free at any price.
Watch the bandwidth line, because it is shared. The Hobby workspace includes 5 GB a month across all services and static sites, then charges $0.15 per GB, so a Free service serving 20 GB of images costs $2.25 in overage while the compute stays at $0. That is the cheapest part of Render and the easiest to forget.
Bottom line
Start on Free if the app can tolerate a 1-minute cold start and stores nothing on local disk, and move to the $7 Starter instance the first time a real user complains about the wait. Skipping to $25 for 1 CPU and 2 GB only makes sense when the app is actually short of memory, which for most side projects it is not (calculated 2026-10-25).
Frequently asked questions
How long does a Render Free service take to wake up?
About 1 minute. The service spins down after 15 minutes without inbound HTTP requests or WebSocket messages and shows a loading page while it restarts, so the first visitor after a quiet period pays that latency.
What are Render's 750 free instance hours?
750 hours of Free instance time per workspace per calendar month, which is 31.25 days of a single always-on service (calculated 2026-10-25). Spun-down services do not burn hours, the balance resets monthly, and unused hours do not roll over.
Is the $7 Starter instance the same as Render's old Standard plan?
No. Starter is the new name for the 0.5 CPU / 512 MB instance that costs $7 a month, while Standard is the 1 CPU / 2 GB instance at $25. Render introduced the new plan IDs in August 2026 and states that specs and pricing are identical under either name.
Does Render Free include a database?
1 GB of Postgres for 30 days, after which it expires following a 14-day grace period and cannot be restored. The first paid database is $6 a month for 256 MB, and free Key Value storage is in-memory only.
Sources
- Render pricingChecked 2026-10-25
- Render docs: free tier limitsChecked 2026-10-25
- Render docs: compute plan typesChecked 2026-10-25
Cite this page
Nadia Voss (2026). “Render Free vs Starter in 2026: a $0 service that sleeps, or $7 that does not”. Actual Database. https://actualdatabase.com/render-free-vs-starter-pricing/