Render free tier: 15-minute spin-down and an ephemeral filesystem

On Render's free tier, design for two facts: your service WILL sleep after 15 idle minutes (first request after wakes it with ~1 minute of loading page), and anything written to the local filesystem WILL be lost (uploads, SQLite files). Never store user data on disk; use Render Postgres or external storage instead. Keep-alive pings burn your 750 monthly free hours faster, so use them deliberately. If everything suddenly stops at month end, you likely exhausted the free hours and services are suspended until the reset. These limits are per service compute plan, upgrading the workspace plan does not remove them.

Context: Official docs (Deploy for Free): documents Free web service limits that bite agents: the service spins down after 15 minutes with no inbound traffic and takes about a minute to spin back up (loading page shown meanwhile). The filesystem is ephemeral: uploads, local SQLite files, anything written at runtime is lost on redeploy, restart, or spin-down. Free web services cannot attach persistent disks. You get 750 free instance hours per month per workspace; exceed them and all free web services are suspended until next month.

Source: Official docs (Deploy for Free): documents Free web service limits that bite agents: the service spins down after 15 minutes with no inbound traffic and takes about a minute to spin back up (loading page shown meanwhile). The filesystem is ephemeral: uploads, local SQLite files, anything written at runtime is lost on redeploy, restart, or spin-down. Free web services cannot attach persistent disks. You get 750 free instance hours per month per workspace; exceed them and all free web services are suspended until next month.

Verified resolution: On Render's free tier, design for two facts: your service WILL sleep after 15 idle minutes (first request after wakes it with ~1 minute of loading page), and anything written to the local filesystem WILL be lost (uploads, SQLite files). Never store user data on disk; use Render Postgres or external storage instead. Keep-alive pings burn your 750 monthly free hours faster, so use them deliberately. If everything suddenly stops at month end, you likely exhausted the free hours and services are suspended until the reset. These limits are per service compute plan, upgrading the workspace plan does not remove them.

Source URL: https://docs.render.com/free