Netlify Alternatives in 2026 (After the Credit-Based Free Plan)

Netlify made static hosting easy: drag in a folder, get a URL, add a _redirects file and a form, done. Since September 2025, new Netlify accounts are on credit-based plans, and the free one has a hard ceiling. When a team’s 300 monthly credits run out, every site it owns is paused until the next month.

This guide is for people hosting static or Jamstack sites on Netlify: HTML, a static site generator, maybe a contact form and some redirects. If you run a Next.js app with server features, our Vercel alternatives guide is the better fit. Limits, prices and features were checked on each host’s own pricing pages, documentation and terms on November 12, 2026. We did not deploy test sites to every host, so where a feature is described below, it is what the host documents.

The Short Answer

• Best free replacement for most static sites: Cloudflare Pages. Static requests are free and unlimited, it reads the same _redirects file, and you can drag and drop a folder.
• Free and already where your code lives: GitHub Pages, for personal and open-source projects. Its terms rule out using it for an online business, and it has no redirects or forms.
• A free host that is fine for commercial sites: Cloudflare Pages again. Vercel’s free plan is for non-commercial use only.
• Drag-and-drop uploads with forms built in, for a small fee: Static.app, from $5 a month billed yearly, with unlimited traffic.
• Several small sites, free, with Git deploys: Render static sites or DigitalOcean App Platform, but watch their small bandwidth allowances.
• A personal or hobby site with a community: Neocities, with 200 GB of free bandwidth but no custom domain on the free plan.

Why People Leave Netlify Now

On the current plans, everything is paid for in credits. Free includes 300 a month, Personal ($9) 1,000 and Pro ($20) 3,000. Netlify’s documentation prices a production deploy at 15 credits and bandwidth at 20 credits per GB, so 300 credits buys roughly 15 GB of traffic or 20 deploys, or a mix of both. Form submissions and deploy previews are not metered.

The catch is what happens at zero. Free accounts cannot buy extra credits. When the allowance runs out, “all projects owned by that team enter a paused state”: visitors see “Site not available,” forms stop accepting submissions and deploys stop, until the next billing cycle or an upgrade. One busy month on one site can take every site in the team offline.

Accounts created before September 4, 2025 stay on Netlify’s legacy plans unless they switch, so if you are on an old free plan, check which one you have before moving anything.

Netlify Features You Will Need to Replace

• Redirects: a _redirects file or netlify.toml rules, including 200 rewrites and country conditions.
• Forms: add data-netlify="true" to a form and submissions appear in the dashboard.
• Functions: small serverless endpoints, for example to call an API with a secret key.
• Deploy previews: a temporary URL for every pull request.
• Netlify Drop: drag a folder onto a web page and get a live site, no Git needed.

Few hosts offer all five. Decide which ones your site actually uses; for many brochure sites it is just redirects and one contact form.

Comparison Table

Commercial-use notes come from each host’s terms or fair-use pages. “No restriction found” means we found no non-commercial clause, not that the host has written a permission.

The Alternatives

1. Cloudflare Pages: the closest free replacement

Cloudflare Pages serves static files for free with no bandwidth limit: its docs say requests to static assets are “free and unlimited” on every plan. The free plan allows 500 builds a month, 20,000 files per site and 100 projects. You can connect a Git repository with preview deployments, or drag and drop a folder of up to 1,000 files in the dashboard. A drag-and-drop project cannot be switched to Git later, so choose at the start.

It reads Netlify-style _redirects and _headers files, with differences covered below. It has no forms; pair it with a form service. One thing to know: Cloudflare’s own docs now say “If you are starting a new project, use Workers instead of Pages,” because new features go to Workers. Workers static assets also read _redirects, and Pages keeps working.

2. GitHub Pages: free for personal and open-source sites

GitHub Pages publishes a site from a repository, with a custom domain, at no cost. Its soft limits are a 1 GB site, 100 GB of bandwidth a month and 10 builds an hour. Two restrictions matter. GitHub’s terms say Pages is not meant as free hosting for an online business, e-commerce site or SaaS. And on a free GitHub account the repository must be public. There are no server-side redirects, forms, functions or deploy previews; redirects are usually faked with small HTML pages that use a meta refresh.

3. Vercel: great tooling, but not for commercial sites on free

Vercel’s Hobby plan includes 100 GB of transfer and 100 deployments a day, with Git deploys and previews. Its fair-use guidelines restrict Hobby to “non-commercial personal use only,” and define commercial broadly: payments, ads, affiliate sites, or being paid to build the site all count. Pro costs $20 a month per seat. Redirects live in vercel.json, up to 2,048 rules; there is no _redirects file and no form handling.

4. Render: free static sites with Git deploys

Render says static sites are “always free to deploy,” with pull-request previews and free custom domains with TLS. The free workspace includes only 5 GB of bandwidth a month, then $0.15 per GB, and 500 build minutes. Redirects and rewrites are set in the dashboard or in render.yaml, and only apply when no file exists at the path. Without a payment method on file, Render says it pauses a workspace’s services for the rest of the month when bandwidth runs out; the docs don’t say whether that covers static sites. Good for low-traffic sites and teams that already run apps on Render.

5. Firebase Hosting and DigitalOcean App Platform

Firebase Hosting deploys from its command-line tool, with redirects and rewrites in firebase.json. The free Spark plan includes 10 GB of storage, but its transfer allowance is small, and Google’s own pages disagree on whether it is 360 MB a day or 10 GB a month. Functions need the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan. It makes sense if your app already uses Firebase.

DigitalOcean App Platform hosts up to three static sites for free, each with 1 GiB of outbound transfer a month, then $0.02 per GiB. Extra static apps cost $3 a month. Redirects are configured in the app spec rather than a _redirects file.

6. Static.app: drag-and-drop hosting with forms

Static.app replaces the Netlify Drop part of the workflow: you upload a ZIP of HTML, CSS and images, and it hosts it with unlimited traffic. Paid plans add custom domains, form handling (add a static-form attribute to your form and submissions appear in the dashboard), and per-page 301, 302, 307 and 308 redirects. Besides the web upload there is a Mac app that syncs a folder. Starter costs $5 a month billed yearly or $6 monthly for 2 sites; Medium is $10 or $12 for 7 sites. There is a 7-day trial but no free plan, and no Git deploys, deploy previews or functions. It suits designers and small businesses who update a site by uploading files rather than pushing code.

7. Surge, Neocities and Tiiny Host

Surge publishes a folder with one terminal command, free, including a custom domain and HTTPS. Projects can be up to 450 MB. Redirects need a ROUTER file, which is a Pro feature at $30 a month; single-page apps can use a free 200.html fallback.

Neocities gives free sites 1 GB of storage and 200 GB of bandwidth, with a browser-based editor. Custom domains, multiple sites and a less strict content security policy need the $5-a-month Supporter plan. Tiiny Host is built for sharing a single page or prototype quickly; its free plan allows one project of up to 3 MB without a custom domain. Our Tiiny Host alternatives guide covers that niche.

Moving Your _redirects File

Here are three typical Netlify rules: one moved page, one moved section, and a fallback that sends every unknown URL to index.html for a single-page app.

# Netlify _redirects
/old-page   /new-page             301
/blog/*     /articles/:splat      301
/*          /index.html           200

Cloudflare Pages reads the same file. Keep the status codes written out: Cloudflare’s default is 302, not Netlify’s 301. It does not support country, language or cookie conditions, query-string matching or proxying to another domain, and it allows 2,000 static and 100 dynamic rules.

Vercel uses vercel.json. Without statusCode, a permanent redirect returns 308:

{
  "redirects": [
    { "source": "/old-page", "destination": "/new-page", "statusCode": 301 },
    { "source": "/blog/:path*", "destination": "/articles/:path*", "statusCode": 301 }
  ],
  "rewrites": [
    { "source": "/(.*)", "destination": "/index.html" }
  ]
}

Firebase Hosting uses firebase.json, with 301 or 302 only:

{
  "hosting": {
    "public": "public",
    "redirects": [
      { "source": "/old-page", "destination": "/new-page", "type": 301 },
      { "source": "/blog/:post*", "destination": "/articles/:post", "type": 301 }
    ],
    "rewrites": [ { "source": "**", "destination": "/index.html" } ]
  }
}

Render and DigitalOcean take the same rules in their dashboards or config files. Static.app sets a redirect per page in its page settings. GitHub Pages and free Surge have no server-side redirects; for a handful of moved pages, an HTML page at the old address with a meta refresh and a canonical link is the usual stopgap. After moving, check each old URL returns the status you expect, for example with curl -I https://example.com/old-page.

Moving Your Forms

Netlify Forms only works on Netlify. Elsewhere, point the form’s action at a form backend and remove the data-netlify attribute. Free tiers checked on November 12, 2026:

• Formspree: 50 submissions a month free; paid from $10 a month billed yearly.
• Basin: 50 submissions a month and one form free.
• Web3Forms: 250 submissions a month free.
• Static.app Forms: included on its paid plans, if you host there.

Our guide to an HTML contact form on a static site has the markup, validation and spam protection, and works with any of these.

For a broader list of static hosts, including ones not aimed at Netlify users, see our best static hosting roundup. If an AI tool wrote your site, our guide to publishing a Claude-generated website walks through putting it online on several of these hosts.

FAQ

Is Netlify still free?

Yes, with 300 credits a month on accounts created since September 4, 2025. That covers roughly 15 GB of bandwidth or 20 deploys. When the credits run out, all of the team’s sites pause until the next month, and free accounts cannot buy more.

Cloudflare Pages or Netlify?

For static sites, Cloudflare Pages has the more generous free plan: unlimited static traffic and 500 builds a month, and it reads the same _redirects file. Netlify has built-in forms and more redirect options, such as country conditions.

What is the best free alternative to GitHub Pages?

Cloudflare Pages, especially for commercial sites, which GitHub’s terms rule out. It also supports redirects, private repositories and preview deployments.

What is a good alternative to Neocities?

For a free custom domain, Cloudflare Pages or Surge. For drag-and-drop uploads with forms, Static.app, from $5 a month billed yearly.

Can I host a commercial site on a free plan?

On Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, Render and Surge, we found no rule against it. Vercel’s Hobby plan and GitHub Pages restrict commercial use.

Do I lose my Netlify forms data when I move?

Export submissions from the Netlify dashboard before you delete the site. New submissions will go to whichever form backend you set up.