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The honest answer

There's no truly free, permanent, full-featured Paperclip hosting. Every free tier has one of these trade-offs:

1. Sleep on inactivity — breaks agent heartbeats (Render free tier, Glitch)
2. Time-limited credits — free for the first month, then you pay (Railway $20 credit)
3. Limited RAM — less than 512 MB, which is too little for stable Paperclip operation
4. No persistent storage — data lost on restart (most free serverless platforms)

That said, here's what you can actually use:

Railway — $20 free credit (best option to start)

Railway gives you $20 of usage credit when you sign up, no credit card required on the Hobby plan.

What $20 covers:

• ~2–3 months of a small Paperclip instance (512 MB RAM, minimal compute)
• Or ~1 month of a properly-sized instance (1 GB RAM)

What breaks: Hobby plan services can sleep after inactivity. For Paperclip's heartbeat-based agents, this means runs may be missed. Upgrading to Pro ($20/month) removes sleep entirely.

Verdict: Best for testing and getting started. Not free forever, but the $20 credit gives you meaningful time to evaluate Paperclip without spending money.

Oracle Cloud Free Tier (truly free, forever)

Oracle's Always Free tier includes 2 AMD VMs with 1 GB RAM each at no cost — forever.

• ARM instances: 4 Ampere A1 cores + 24 GB RAM total (spread across up to 4 instances)
• AMD instances: 2 VMs × 1 GB RAM + 1 vCPU

The ARM instances are the real deal — 4 vCPU / 24 GB RAM on the Ampere A1 is more than enough for a serious Paperclip deployment.

Setup:

• Create an Oracle Cloud account (requires credit card for identity verification, but won't be charged)
• Provision an Ampere A1 VM
• Follow the same Ubuntu VPS setup as Hetzner or DigitalOcean

Caveats:

• Oracle Cloud's UI is complex
• Provisioning can be hit-or-miss (availability fluctuates)
• Support is minimal for free tier users
• Outbound network is capped at 10 TB/month (more than enough for Paperclip)

Verdict: The best genuinely free option if you're willing to navigate Oracle's dashboard.

Fly.io free tier

Fly.io offers:

• 3 shared-CPU-1x-256MB machines free
• 3 GB persistent volume storage free

The problem: 256 MB RAM is too little for Paperclip. You'll need to upgrade to at least 512 MB ($2–3/month) or the 1 GB shared-CPU ($5.70/month).

Verdict: Not quite free for Paperclip, but very cheap.

Render free tier

Render's free tier offers:

• 1 web service
• Auto-spins down after 15 minutes of inactivity
• Starts back up in ~30–50 seconds on first request

The problem: Paperclip agents fire scheduled heartbeats. If the instance is asleep when a heartbeat is due, the run is missed. This makes the free tier unusable for any automated agent work.

Verdict: Only usable if you access Paperclip manually and don't rely on scheduled agent heartbeats.

LocalTunnel / ngrok (for local Paperclip)

If you run Paperclip locally on your own machine, you can expose it temporarily with ngrok or LocalTunnel:

# Install ngrok
npm install -g ngrok

# Start Paperclip
npx paperclipai server start

# Expose it
ngrok http 3100

This gives you a temporary public URL. Fine for development and demos, not for production.

Cost: Free with limitations (random URL, limited connections). Paid ngrok plans give you custom domains and more connections.

Raspberry Pi (hardware cost, zero ongoing cost)

A Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB RAM model) runs Paperclip reliably. After the ~$75 hardware cost, ongoing costs are:

• Electricity: ~$3–5/year (3W average draw)
• Internet: Part of your existing home internet bill

This is the cheapest option over time, but requires home hardware and a stable internet connection.

Not recommended if:

• You need 99.9% uptime
• Your home internet goes down frequently
• You're not comfortable with port forwarding or a dynamic DNS setup

The actual cheapest paid option

If free tiers don't work for your use case, the cheapest always-on paid options are:

| Option | Cost/month | Notes | |---|---|---| | Hetzner CX11 | €3.29 | 2 GB RAM, reliable | | Linode Nanode | $5.00 | 1 GB RAM, tight | | Railway (usage-based) | $5–10 | Depends on compute hours | | Render Starter | $7.00 | Always-on |

Hetzner CX11 at €3.29/month is the cheapest meaningful option for a self-hosted always-on Paperclip instance.

Summary

| Option | Cost | Sleep? | RAM | Verdict | |---|---|---|---|---| | Railway credit | $0 for 1–2 months | Sometimes | Configurable | Best for starting | | Oracle Always Free | $0 forever | No | 24 GB (ARM) | Best truly-free option | | Fly.io free | ~$3/month to avoid sleep | No | 512 MB+ | Nearly free | | Render free | $0 | Yes | 512 MB | Breaks agent runs | | Raspberry Pi | $75 hardware + $0/mo | No | 4–8 GB | Good if you have one |

This is an independent guide. Paperclip Hosting is not affiliated with the official Paperclip project. Guide steps are based on real deployments and are subject to change as the software evolves.