Design portfolio, maybe 30 images, no backend, and I'd like not to pay for it while I'm between contracts. I know free tiers are loss-leaders and I'm fine with that. I want to know which limit I'll hit first: bandwidth, build minutes, or a terms change. Domain is already bought and I'm comfortable pointing DNS at whatever.
The catch is usually the commercial-use clause rather than the technical limits. Read whether the free tier permits a site that advertises your paid services, because some explicitly do and some quietly don't.
That's a much more likely trap for me than bandwidth ever was. Checking the terms now.
In practice nobody gets enforced against for a portfolio. But "nobody gets enforced against" is not a plan you can put under a client site.
Put your own domain on it from day one rather than the provider's subdomain. Migrating a site is easy. Migrating everyone's bookmarks and your search results is not.
Already have the domain, and this is precisely why I bothered buying it before building anything.
Images are where free tiers get expensive in spirit if not in money. Thirty unoptimised photographs at 4 MB each is a slow site regardless of who's paying for the bandwidth. Resize and compress before you think about hosting at all.
Six years, three different free hosts, one migration each time a terms change annoyed me. Total spend still zero. It's fine as long as the source lives somewhere you control.
@row_level_sam · 10mo ago
For a 30-image portfolio you will hit none of them. Build minutes are the limit people actually reach, and only if they've wired up a rebuild on every commit for a site they edit constantly. 500 builds a month is an enormous number of deploys for a portfolio.
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