Free bot hosting: sleep, limits and hidden trade-offs

Anyone shipping a first bot searches for "free hosting" for an obvious reason: nobody wants to pay before knowing the bot works. The catch is that a bot is not a website. It needs a live process all the time, and almost every free offer was designed for low-traffic sites.

Below is what each kind of free offer usually delivers, where it breaks a bot, and when it is still fine to use. The numbers behind these offers change often, so check each provider's documentation for current values.

Why doesn't a bot work on an offer that sleeps?#

A Discord bot opens a WebSocket connection to the Discord Gateway and keeps it open, sending heartbeats. Messages, commands and events arrive over that connection. If the process stops, the connection drops and the bot shows as offline. The Gateway documentation describes this cycle.

Offers that sleep on inactivity measure activity as inbound traffic: HTTP requests reaching your service. A Discord bot barely receives any, because it opens the connection outward. From the platform's point of view, the service is idle, even if the bot is busy answering commands. The same applies to a Telegram bot using long polling.

What does Render's free offer include?#

Render's documentation describes limits like these for free web services (the exact values are on that page):

• spin down after a few minutes without inbound traffic;
• a noticeable wait to come back on the next request;
• a monthly hour quota per workspace; when it runs out, free services stay suspended until next month;
• an ephemeral filesystem: local files are lost on redeploy, restart or spin-down, and there are no persistent disks;
• outbound email (SMTP) ports blocked.

Other service types, such as background workers, are not listed as free. In practice, a Discord bot there would have to pose as a website and be pinged from outside all the time, and it would still lose any file written to disk, such as a SQLite database.

Render's free Postgres expires a few weeks after creation, with a grace period before deletion, holds little data and has no backups. The free Key Value (Redis-compatible) store keeps data in memory only and loses everything on restart.

What about Oracle Cloud's Always Free resources?#

This is the free offer closest to a real machine. According to Oracle's documentation, it includes a few small AMD instances and an Arm Ampere A1 allowance, plus block storage. The exact size of each resource is on that page.

The hidden costs are different:

• Idle reclamation. Oracle may reclaim instances it considers idle, based on CPU and network use (and memory use on A1) over several days. A small bot often sits under that line.
• Capacity shortages. The "out of host capacity" error appears when the region has nothing available, and all you can do is retry later.
• You run the server. It is a VM: operating system, security updates, firewall, process supervisor and restarts are your job. See VPS for a Discord bot.
• Fixed home region. Instances must be created in your account's home region.

If you can administer Linux and accept the risk, it works. If you only want to upload your code, it is a lot of work.

Which free platforms are gone?#

Providers that used to be the entry point for bots stopped being an option:

• Heroku: since November 28, 2022 it no longer offers free dynos, Postgres or Redis (official notice).
• Glitch: ended project hosting on July 8, 2025 (announcement).

The lesson is about planning: a bot that grows on top of a free offer depends on a decision the provider can make at any time. If the bot has users, a forced migration becomes downtime.

Can an external ping keep the bot awake?#

For an HTTP service, yes: an external monitor hitting a URL every few minutes avoids the inactivity sleep. But it is a patch. It burns your monthly hours, does nothing about the ephemeral disk, and depends on a third party that can fail.

If you need to know why the bot went down, read why a Discord bot goes offline to tell a process crash from a connection problem.

When is a free offer still fine?#

• Learning and testing a bot nobody uses yet.
• A site or API that only answers requests and tolerates a wait on the first call.
• A portfolio project that can be offline.

It does not suit a community bot, a music bot, a WhatsApp bot with a saved session, or anything that loses data when the disk is wiped. Running on your own computer is another temporary option, but the bot stops when the machine does, as running a bot on a phone or PC vs hosting explains. To estimate what a paid bot costs, see how much it costs to host a Discord bot and how to keep a bot online 24/7.

How to do this on Square Cloud#

Once the bot is past testing, it needs the opposite of every limit in this article. On Square Cloud the entry plan is paid, and what it covers answers those limits one by one:

• Sleep on inactivity: the application runs in an isolated, always-on container, with no cold start, no sleep mode and no inactivity rule. It does not depend on inbound traffic, so a Discord bot or a Telegram bot using polling needs no external ping.
• Monthly hours: the container stays on all month, with no hour quota to burn through.
• Temporary disk: the disk persists across restarts and deploys, so a SQLite database or a WhatsApp bot's session folder stays in place.
• Expiring database: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB and Redis hosting starts on Standard, from R$44.99 per month, with an automatic daily snapshot.
• Restarts: automatic restart is on by default for dashboard deploys and brings the application back when the process exits with an error.

Hobby costs R$12.49 per month for 1 GB of RAM and 1 vCPU, covering bots and sites. RAM is a pool shared across your applications, with a 256 MB minimum per background application such as a bot, and you pay by Pix or card with no lock-in. Discord, Telegram and WhatsApp each have a page with the compatible libraries; start at bot hosting and compare plans on pricing.