Northflank Developer Sandbox

Overview

Northflank offers a permanently free Developer Sandbox plan for hobby projects, prototypes and platform evaluation. It includes always-on compute with no sleeping or cold starts, and it runs on the same control plane used by paid plans.

Free Tier Quotas & Limits

• 2 services (long-running deployments such as web apps, APIs or workers).
• 2 jobs (scheduled or run-to-completion workloads).
• 1 addon (a managed database such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB or Redis).
• Up to 1 BYOC cluster: you can connect your own AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, CoreWeave, Civo or bare-metal account and let Northflank orchestrate it. Your cloud provider still bills you for the underlying infrastructure.
• Always-on compute: the pricing page lists "Always-on-compute, no sleeping".
• Secret groups and pipelines are listed as unlimited; compute size is listed only as "Limited".

Northflank does not publish free-tier figures for egress, HTTP requests, log volume or metric volume on its pricing or billing documentation pages; those are metered pay-as-you-go items.

Eligibility

Available to any Northflank user. Northflank's billing documentation states that "all users must add a payment method to start creating resources on Northflank, regardless of plan selection", for identity verification and abuse prevention. Adding a card does not change the plan, and the FAQ notes "when you enter a card we only verify the card".

How to Get Started

1. Create an account at app.northflank.com/signup using GitHub, GitLab, Google or email.
2. Add a payment method when prompted.
3. Create a project, then add services, jobs and an addon within the Sandbox quotas.
4. Deploy from a Git repository, a container registry or a prebuilt image; Northflank provides free SSL, custom domains and API/CLI access.

Northflank positions the Sandbox for testing and hobby use and states it "should not be used for production applications".