Best Free Tools for Solo Developers in 2025

Money is tight when you're building solo.

Every dollar spent on tools is a dollar not spent on hosting, marketing, or your own survival. Subscriptions add up. Before you know it, you're paying $200/month for tools and your product hasn't made a cent.

I've spent years finding free alternatives that actually work. Not crappy freemium with unusable limits. Genuinely useful free tools.

Here's everything I use that costs nothing.

Development Tools

VS Code (Free)

The obvious one. But it's obvious for a reason.

VS Code is genuinely the best code editor available, and it's completely free. Extensions for every language. Integrated terminal. Git integration. Debugging. Everything.

I tried paid alternatives. Came back to VS Code every time.

Must-have extensions..

• GitLens (git history and blame)
• Prettier (code formatting)
• ESLint/Pylint (linting)
• Thunder Client (API testing)
• Docker extension

Git + GitHub (Free)

Version control is non-negotiable. GitHub gives you unlimited free private repositories.

The free tier includes..

• Unlimited private repos
• GitHub Actions (2000 minutes/month for CI/CD)
• GitHub Pages (free static hosting)
• Issues and project boards
• Copilot suggestions in VS Code (limited free tier now)

For solo development, the free tier is more than enough.

Postman (Free)

API development and testing. The free tier handles everything I need.

Create collections, save requests, test endpoints, generate documentation. You can even share collections with collaborators.

Alternative: Thunder Client extension in VS Code if you want to stay in the editor.

TablePlus (Free Tier)

Database GUI that's actually good. The free tier limits you to 2 connections and 2 tabs, which is annoying but workable for solo projects.

Connects to PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and more. Way better than command-line database management.

Alternative: DBeaver is completely free and open source, just slightly less polished.

Hosting and Deployment

Railway (Free Tier)

$5 free credit per month. For small projects, that's enough to run a basic app.

Railway makes deployment stupid simple. Connect your GitHub repo, configure environment variables, deploy. Automatic SSL, managed databases, the works.

I use Railway for staging environments and small projects. Production stuff usually goes to a VPS, but Railway is great for getting started.

Vercel (Free Tier)

Best free hosting for frontend apps and static sites.

Generous limits for the free tier..

• Unlimited static sites
• Serverless functions
• Automatic SSL
• Preview deployments on PRs
• Analytics (basic)

This blog could easily run on Vercel for free. Any React, Next.js, or Astro site works great.

Netlify (Free Tier)

Similar to Vercel. Excellent for static sites and Jamstack apps.

Free tier includes..

• 100GB bandwidth/month
• Continuous deployment from Git
• Form handling (100 submissions/month)
• Serverless functions

I've bounced between Vercel and Netlify. Both are excellent. Pick whichever you like.

Cloudflare Pages (Free)

Cloudflare's hosting offering. Very generous free tier..

• Unlimited sites
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited requests

Plus you get Cloudflare's CDN and DDoS protection. For static sites, it's hard to beat.

GitHub Pages (Free)

Free static hosting directly from your GitHub repo.

Perfect for documentation sites, project landing pages, or simple blogs. Limited to static content (no server-side rendering), but completely free with no limits.

Databases

PlanetScale (Free Tier)

Serverless MySQL with a genuinely useful free tier.

5GB storage, 1 billion row reads per month, 10 million row writes. For early-stage products, that's plenty.

The branching workflow is great too. Create a branch, make schema changes, merge. Like git for databases.

Supabase (Free Tier)

Firebase alternative that's actually open source.

Free tier includes..

• PostgreSQL database (500MB)
• Authentication
• Storage (1GB)
• Realtime subscriptions
• Edge functions

I've used Supabase for side projects. The auth system alone saves hours of development time.

Neon (Free Tier)

Serverless PostgreSQL. The free tier gives you 512MB storage and 3GB of data transfer.

The coolest feature: database branching. Create a branch for development, test your migrations, merge to production.

SQLite (Free Forever)

Don't overlook SQLite.

For many solo projects, you don't need a separate database server. SQLite is a file-based database that's fast, reliable, and completely free.

I use SQLite for local development and sometimes even production for small projects. No server to manage, no connection strings, just a file.

Backend Services

Auth0 (Free Tier)

Authentication as a service. The free tier includes..

• 7,000 active users
• Unlimited logins
• Social connections
• MFA

Building auth from scratch is tedious and error-prone. Auth0 handles it for you.

Alternative: Supabase Auth (included with Supabase free tier).

Resend (Free Tier)

Transactional email that developers actually like.

100 emails/day on the free tier. Simple API. Good deliverability.

For early-stage products with low volume, the free tier is enough.

Stripe (Free to Start)

Payment processing. No monthly fees. You only pay per transaction (2.9% + 30¢).

Stripe's documentation is excellent. Their API is clean. For solo developers charging for products, it's the obvious choice.

Cloudflare (Free Tier)

CDN, DNS, DDoS protection, and more. All free.

Even if you're not using Cloudflare for hosting, put your domains behind Cloudflare. The security and performance improvements are worth it.

Design and UI

Figma (Free Tier)

Professional design tool with a usable free tier.

3 projects, unlimited viewers, all the design features. For solo work, that's enough.

I'm not a designer, but I can mock up interfaces in Figma before building them. Saves time and helps clarify what I'm building.

Tailwind CSS (Free)

Not a tool exactly, but a free CSS framework that changed how I build UIs.

Utility classes, no custom CSS for most things, responsive design built in. Ships smaller bundles than most CSS frameworks.

I use Tailwind for everything now. The productivity gains are real.

Heroicons (Free)

Beautiful SVG icons from the Tailwind team. Completely free, MIT licensed.

Also check out: Lucide Icons, Phosphor Icons, Feather Icons. All free.

Unsplash (Free)

Free stock photos that don't look like stock photos.

Use them for landing pages, blog posts, social media. No attribution required (though appreciated).

Automation

N8N (Self-Hosted, Free)

This is my secret weapon for automation.

N8N is like Zapier, but you self-host it. No per-task pricing. Unlimited workflows. More powerful features.

I automate social media posting, email sequences, data syncing, monitoring. All for the cost of a small server (or free if you run it on the same server as your app).

GitHub Actions (Free Tier)

CI/CD included with GitHub.

2000 minutes/month on the free tier. For solo projects with modest build times, that's plenty.

I use Actions for automated testing, deployment, and scheduled tasks.

Zapier (Free Tier)

If you don't want to self-host, Zapier's free tier gives you 100 tasks/month across 5 single-step zaps.

Very limited, but enough for simple automations.

IFTTT (Free Tier)

Similar to Zapier. More consumer-focused but useful for simple automations.

Monitoring and Analytics

Sentry (Free Tier)

Error tracking that actually helps you fix bugs.

5K errors/month on the free tier. Captures stack traces, context, user info. Invaluable for production debugging.

Plausible (Self-Hosted, Free)

Privacy-focused analytics. Self-hosted version is free and open source.

Simple, fast, doesn't track users invasively. Good enough for understanding traffic patterns without the creepiness of Google Analytics.

Alternative: Umami (similar concept, also self-hostable).

UptimeRobot (Free Tier)

Uptime monitoring. Checks your site every 5 minutes, alerts you when it goes down.

50 monitors on the free tier. More than enough for solo projects.

BetterStack (Free Tier)

Logs, uptime monitoring, and incident management.

The free tier is generous. Good alternative to cobbling together multiple services.

Productivity

Notion (Free Tier)

Notes, docs, databases, project management. The free tier is unlimited for personal use.

I track projects, write documentation, plan features. All in Notion.

Linear (Free Tier)

Issue tracking that doesn't suck. Generous free tier for small teams (including solo developers).

Faster than Jira. Better designed than GitHub Issues. Worth checking out.

Obsidian (Free)

Local-first notes in Markdown. Completely free for personal use.

I use Obsidian for personal knowledge management. All my notes are plain text files I own forever.

The Philosophy

Here's what ties this all together.

Start free, upgrade when necessary.

Don't pay for tools before you need them. Most free tiers are generous enough for early-stage products. When you outgrow them, you'll have revenue to pay.

Own your data when possible.

Self-hosted options (N8N, Plausible) give you control. No vendor lock-in. No surprise pricing changes.

Fewer tools is better.

Every tool is cognitive overhead. I'd rather use fewer tools well than have accounts on 50 services I barely touch.

Good enough is good enough.

Free tiers often have limitations. Usually those limitations don't matter until you're successful enough to afford paid plans.

Build first, optimize later. Ship with free tools, upgrade when you have users paying you.