I Moved 5 Side Projects to $0/Month Free Tiers — Vercel, Neon, and Cloudflare Paid Me Back $62/Month

Description and use

Migrating five small side projects to free tiers of Vercel, Neon, and Cloudflare reduced monthly costs from $62 to $0 while maintaining 99.9% uptime and improving performance.

Problem

Monthly hosting and database costs for five small side projects exceeded $60/month, despite each having under 1,000 users.

Outcome

Reduced monthly cost from $62 to $0 while maintaining 99.9% uptime and improving performance with global CDN.

Workflow

• 1. Migrate Postgres: pg_dump from VPS, psql to Neon using connection string.
• 2. Use Neon branches for PR testing: neon branches create --name pr-42, run migrations/tests, delete branch.
• 3. Move cron jobs to Cloudflare Workers Cron: add crons = ["*/15 * * * *"] in wrangler.toml and fetch keep-warm endpoint.
• 4. Replace VPS container API with Cloudflare Workers + Durable Object.
• 5. Switch frontend hosting to Vercel, CDN/DNS to Cloudflare free, Redis to Upstash.
• 6. Monitor for cold starts and timeouts; keep warm via cron and move heavy PDF generation to queue.

Evidence

Moving Postgres from my VPS to Neon took 10 minutes: pg_dump ... psql ...

Source

Neon cold starts — free tier scales to zero. First query after idle: ~800ms penalty.

Source

Before: $62/month = $744/year; After: $0/month, 99.9% uptime over 90 days

Source