Running your Discord bot on your laptop works until you close it. For 24/7 uptime, you need a server that stays online. Here are the free options ranked by reliability.
Quick answer: Oracle Cloud Always Free is the only option below that gives you a full server at no cost, and it takes some Linux work to set up. Fly.io no longer lists a free allowance for new accounts, Railway's free plan gives $1 of credit a month, and Replit's free published app goes down after 30 days. Our own free Starter plan is out of stock right now, so it is not on this list. If you would rather pay a little than run a server yourself, Space-Node's Growth plan is €0.50 a month for 512 MB RAM, with no sleep mode and an automatic restart after a crash. Prices and limits are further down under When to Pay.
| Option | Cost | Online 24/7? | Main catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle Cloud Always Free | Free, card needed for verification | Yes | Linux setup, idle instances can be reclaimed |
| Fly.io | Trial only for new accounts | Only during the trial | Card on file to keep apps running |
| Railway | $1 of credit a month after a $5 trial | Only while usage fits the credit | $1 covers roughly 100 MB of RAM |
| Replit | Free Starter plan | No | Published app is taken down after 30 days |
| Space-Node Growth | €0.50 a month, billed €3.00 per 6 months | Yes | Not free, and a €0.50 setup fee on the 6 month and 1 year terms |
Option 1: Oracle Cloud Always Free (Best Free Option)
Oracle Cloud gives you a free VM that never sleeps.
What you get:
- Arm Ampere A1 compute equal to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB RAM (older guides that say 4 cores and 24 GB are out of date)
- Up to two small AMD micro VMs on top of that
- 200 GB block storage
- 10 TB outbound data per month
- No expiration date
Setup:
- Create an Oracle Cloud account (requires credit card for verification, not charged)
- Create an "Always Free" Compute instance (Ubuntu 24.04, ARM shape)
- SSH in, install Node.js or Python
- Upload your bot code
- Run with PM2 or systemd
npm install pm2 -g
pm2 start bot.js --name "my-bot"
pm2 save && pm2 startup
Downsides: ARM architecture means some npm native addons need ARM builds. Oracle can reclaim Always Free instances it sees as idle: over 7 days, CPU at the 95th percentile under 20%, network under 20%, and on Arm shapes memory under 20%. A lightly used bot on a large instance can meet all three. Account creation sometimes gets denied. Our Oracle Cloud free tier guide for Discord bots goes through the firewall and SSH side in more detail.
Option 2: Fly.io (No Longer Free for New Accounts)
Older guides list 3 free shared VMs with 256 MB RAM each. Fly.io's pricing docs no longer list a free allowance. New accounts get a trial of 2 hours of machine runtime or 7 days, whichever comes first, and every organization needs a credit card on file to keep apps running after that. Fine for a quick test, not for a bot that has to stay online.
Option 3: Railway ($1 Monthly Credit)
New Railway accounts get a one time $5 trial credit that lasts 30 days, with no credit card required. After the trial, the Free plan gives $1 of credit per month and caps each service at 0.5 GB RAM and 1 vCPU. Railway bills memory at $10 per GB per month, so $1 covers roughly 100 MB of RAM for a full month before any CPU time is counted. A bigger bot needs the Hobby plan at $5 a month, which includes $5 of usage.
Option 4: Replit (Not for 24/7)
Replit's free Starter plan includes 1 published app, and Replit takes that published link down after 30 days. That makes it a good place to learn and test, not a home for a bot that has to stay online. The cheapest paid plan, Core, is $20 a month, or $18 a month billed annually.
Why Free Fails at Scale
- Memory limits: Check your bot's actual memory use and the plan's limit. Features, caches and dependencies affect what it needs.
- Cold starts: Sleeping services take time to wake up (Render quotes about a minute for its free web services), causing timeouts
- Shared IPs: Other bots on the same IP trigger Discord rate limits affecting your bot
- No monitoring: You find out the bot is down when users complain
When to Pay
Paying makes sense when a free plan's runtime, storage or support limits no longer fit your bot, or when your community depends on it being available. Choose from your bot's requirements rather than a fixed server-count rule.
Space-Node's Discord bot plans run in Ashburn, Virginia, close to Discord's API. The cheapest paid plan is Growth: €0.50 a month for 512 MB RAM and 10 GB NVMe storage at full CPU speed. It has no sleep mode, restarts your bot automatically after a crash, keeps your bot token in environment variables and comes with the Bot Studio starter templates. Growth is billed €3.00 for 6 months. The first payment is €3.50, including a one-time €0.50 setup fee. The same setup fee applies to the 1 year term. The 2 and 3 year terms have no setup fee, and three years of Growth costs €11.99 in total.
Pro is €1.00 a month, billed €6.00 every 6 months, for 1 GB RAM and 20 GB NVMe storage with room for a SQLite database, plus Git deployment support. The first payment for the 6 month term is €6.50, including a one-time €0.50 setup fee. The same setup fee applies to the 1 year term. Pick it for a music bot or a bot that keeps a database.
Our free plan, Starter (64 MB RAM, 1 GB storage), is out of stock right now. Even when it can be ordered, it is a test box without setup or debugging help and without Bot Studio.
Both paid plans include hosting support for uptime, the panel and deploys. Help with your bot's own code is a separate Dev Help add-on. If shared IP rate limits hit your bot, a Dedicated IP add-on costs €18.00 per 6 months.
If you need root access or want to run several bots and a dashboard on one server, a VPS is the next step. Our VPS plans are out of stock until about the end of October.