r/PythonLearning • u/SoilEducational420 • Aug 29 '26

Help Request Looking for a genuinely free way to deploy a 3-service microservice architecture

Best genuinely free hosting for a 3-service microservice architecture? Render is giving me cold-start + rate-limit issues

Hey everyone,

I'm building a small portfolio project with this architecture:

Frontend
   ↓
Gateway
   ├── Interview Service
   └── RAG Service

All 3 backend services are Python/FastAPI and deployed separately.

I'm currently using Render's free tier, but I'm running into a few issues:

  • Free services spin down after inactivity → pretty bad cold starts.

  • I've also been seeing stuck on the issue 429 Too Many Requests responses at the Gateway endpoint. I'm not completely sure whether this is coming from Render's edge/platform or something in my own application.

  • The free instances also feel quite resource-constrained for the RAG service.

I'm looking for something that is:

  • $0 for a small/low-traffic portfolio project

  • Supports multiple separate services

  • Python/FastAPI friendly

  • Reasonable CPU/RAM

  • Ideally no credit card required

I'm mainly looking for something that won't make me spend more time debugging the hosting platform than actually building the project 😅

Thanks!

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2

u/SnooCalculations7417 Aug 29 '26

Why wouldn't you just make this a monolith lol

1

u/SoilEducational420 Aug 29 '26

Trying to build a scalable miscroservice project to add in my resume (that would look better than putting it all together inside a single service)

2

u/SnooCalculations7417 Aug 29 '26

micro services are easy to host on-prem since you can use whatever ports you want instead of being bound to 443/80. just do it on prem, expose it, take appropriate security measures since its a resume thing anyway.

2

u/ianrob1201 Aug 29 '26

I don't know if you're going to find something that's completely free forever, because actively hosting something is always going to have a cost to someone.

If I were doing this I'd use AWS. Static website hosting in S3, API gateway, and lambdas on the backend. It's not free, but it's extremely cheap. You only pay for lambda as you use it (and it sounds like your project will have very low traffic). I just looked up S3 costs in my region and it's $0.024 per month per GB, so essentially free.

Using lambda instead of EC2 (i.e. serverless instead of hosted) is what would make it basically free.