Free Tier: Usage and Limits

Galaxy offers Free apps and Free MongoDB for learning and testing. Each has its own limits, described below.

Apps

You can start with one Free app per account. This limit helps prevent abuse. Your personal account and each organization have separate limits. Organization members share one allowance.

All existing Free apps count toward the limit, across app types and regions: a Free Meteor app and a Sandbox web app count toward the same total. Stopped apps and apps awaiting deployment still count; paid and deleted apps don't.

To create a new Free app, your account must have no Free apps remaining.

If you see Free Tier Limit Reached, you have a few options. Choose a paid plan for the new app, or upgrade an existing Free app to a paid plan.

If you're finished with an existing Free app, you can delete it before creating a replacement. Stopping it isn't enough: it still counts toward the limit.

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Free MongoDB

Galaxy offers a free MongoDB database to help you prototype, learn, and build personal projects. We love supporting developers getting started, but to keep things sustainable for everyone, there are some boundaries.

Think of it like this: the free tier is your sandbox. It's perfect for learning, testing ideas, and shipping personal projects. It's not meant for production apps or commercial services.

The Key Limits

Data storage: You get up to 256MB of storage on the free tier. That's plenty for most prototypes and learning projects. If you're building something bigger, that's a signal to upgrade to a paid database, which gives you way more space and resources.

Uptime expectations: We don't guarantee the same reliability for free databases as we do for paid tiers. Your free database might experience occasional downtime. If uninterrupted service is critical for you (running a business, hosting a customer app), you'll want to move to a paid plan.

What it's for: Learning, prototyping, testing, personal projects. Not commercial use. If you're earning money from your app or using it for a business, upgrade to a paid tier. It's genuinely affordable and way more reliable.

Finding Your Free Database

When you deploy a new app and enable Add Free MongoDB, Galaxy links the database directly to that app. It shows up in the Databases tab of your dashboard alongside paid instances, so you can check its status and credentials without digging through app settings.

A few things worth knowing about this:

• The database shares the app's lifecycle. Delete the app, and the database goes with it.
• This only applies to databases created through the Add Free MongoDB toggle during deployment. Free databases provisioned before this feature was introduced won't appear in the Databases tab retroactively.
• If you don't see an older free database there, it may still be active and reachable via the MONGO_URL in your app's environment. It just predates dashboard visibility support.

What's Not Allowed

There are a few activities we explicitly don't allow on the free tier, even if you somehow stay under your storage limit:

• Cryptocurrency mining or blockchain operations
• Any behavior that significantly strains shared resources, even if it technically fits the numerical limits

We reserve the right to review your usage and restrict access if something looks out of line with typical use cases.

Next Steps

Not sure if you need to upgrade? Check how much storage you're actually using in your Galaxy dashboard. If you're running low or need production reliability, explore our paid database options.

Already on the free tier and running great? Perfect. Keep building. And if you hit the limits, upgrading is super straightforward.

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What's Next?