Guide
Free plan limits compared: what you can actually get for nothing
A side-by-side comparison of free tiers across the SaaS tools we track — seats, storage, API calls, retention and the limits that quietly push you over the free line.
9 minute read
Free tiers are the most competitive pricing in the entire SaaS industry, because they are customer acquisition. They are also the least stable: free tiers get tightened far more often than paid ones, usually without a headline announcement. This is a current comparison of the free plans we track.
How to read this table
Two numbers matter and they are not the same. The headline is what the vendor advertises. The cliff is the point where you get paywalled, which is often far lower and is what actually determines whether the free tier is usable for your workload.
Free plan comparison, 25 Aug 2025
| Vendor | Free tier gives you | The cliff |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub | Unlimited public repos, 3,000 minutes of Actions | Private repos capped by seat; Actions minutes run out mid-month |
| Vercel | 100 GB bandwidth, 1M edge invocations | Commercial use is fine; team collaboration needs a paid seat |
| Supabase | 500 MB database, 1 GB storage, 5 GB egress | Projects pause after 1 week of inactivity |
| Sentry | 5,000 errors/month, 1 user, 30-day retention | Retention drops to 30 days; beyond that the data is gone |
| Cloudflare | Unlimited DNS, 100 GB Workers requests | Advanced WAF and most security rules are paid-only |
| Notion | Unlimited pages, 10 guest seats, 7-day history | Guests capped at 10; page history beyond 7 days is gone |
| Linear | Unlimited issues, 250 members, 10 GB attachments | Member count, not issue count, is the binding limit |
| Slack | 90-day message history, 10 integrations | History older than 90 days is deleted, not archived |
Figures change. Every vendor above has a dedicated page on this site with its full change history and the date each figure was last verified.
The pattern worth noticing
Look down the "cliff" column. The binding limit is almost never the one advertised. It is consistently one of four things:
- History and retention. Notion, Slack and Sentry all cap the free tier at a short window and then delete the data. This is the most common bait-and-switch in the category, because the tool is free indefinitely and the archive is not free at all.
- Guests, not members. A tool advertising "unlimited members for $10" may cap guests at 5. External collaborators are the people you most need to invite and least able to justify a seat for.
- Overage, not a wall. Supabase and Vercel do not block you; they charge. This is friendlier and produces a far more surprising first invoice, because the jump from $0 to $40 is not a price increase, it is a threshold you crossed without noticing.
- Inactivity. Free database and project tiers that pause after a week of inactivity punish exactly the side projects and weekend experiments that made you adopt the tool.
The one number to check first. Whatever the vendor advertises, find the retention or history limit before anything else. A free tier with unlimited usage and 30-day history is far more restrictive than one with hard caps you can see and plan around.
When staying free is the right call
Free tiers are not a consolation prize. For a single user, a small team, or a low-stakes internal tool, the free tier is frequently the correct permanent answer rather than a trial. GitHub's free tier runs production infrastructure. Cloudflare's free tier carries production DNS. Nobody involved is treating either as a stepping stone.
Staying free is right when the limits bind on the things you do not care about, and wrong when they bind on the things that are the point. A free tier that caps API calls is fine for a dashboard nobody watches and useless for a billing integration.
When to upgrade, and to what
When you are about to upgrade, do not jump to the next tier blindly. Two rules save real money:
- Pay for the bottleneck, not the bundle. Most vendors sell a bundle where the next tier up includes the limit you hit plus a lot you do not. Sentry's paid tier solves errors; it does not need to solve everything else. Check whether a smaller add-on exists.
- Upgrade on the cliff, not before. The tier above is usually priced for teams several times your size. If you are at 40% of a limit, the next tier is overpaying. If you are at 95%, you have no choice and no negotiating position either.
Annual billing is almost always the cheaper option, frequently by 15–20%. The catch is that it locks the price, which cuts both ways — you benefit when the vendor raises prices, and you benefit less when they cut them. On a tool you are confident about, take the discount.
Watch the free tiers too
Free tiers are tightened far more often than paid ones, because the vendor is optimising for conversion rather than retention. Of the 18 vendors tracked here, several of the recorded changes are reductions to free-tier allowances rather than adjustments to paid prices.
Subscribe to the vendors you rely on, and you will see a free tier shrink in the same week it happens, with a date attached.
How we keep these accurate
Every figure in this guide traces to a stored crawl of a public pricing page, and the vendor pages link to the source. We do not use vendor-supplied press material as evidence of a price change, because a press release and the live pricing page disagree more often than you would expect. Corrections are made in public — see the changelog.