# Hosting & Costs — the honest table

Prices checked 2026-10-23 at the providers' own pages. Free tiers are
a company's current choice; they can shrink. Nothing in this pack
depends on any single one of them — PocketBase is one file and moves
with a folder copy.

## While you build: $0

PocketBase runs on your own computer (`./pocketbase serve`). Your app
runs wherever you're building it. Total hosting cost during
development: **$0**, and this is the right setup until login passes
its acceptance test locally.

## Your app's pages (the frontend): $0

Static hosting is genuinely free at the tiers a first app needs:

- **Cloudflare Pages** — free plan: unlimited static requests and
  bandwidth, 500 builds/month (plan terms, Oct 2026).
- **Netlify / GitHub Pages** — free tiers in the same class.

Your PocketBase address gets baked into the app as its backend URL —
that is normal and not a secret (it's an address, not a key; the
access rules are what protect the data).

## PocketBase itself (the backend): the real, small bill

A backend has to be awake when a visitor arrives, so it needs an
always-on home. There is no verified fully-free always-on PocketBase
hosting — anyone promising you that is selling something. The honest
routes, cheapest first:

| Route | Price (checked 2026-10-23) | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Your own computer, left on | $0 + electricity | Fine for testing with friends; sleeps when it sleeps |
| **PocketHost** (managed PocketBase hosting) | $5.00/mo effective paid yearly ($59.99/yr), or $9.99/mo monthly; 7-day trial | They run PocketBase for you: SSL, SFTP access, 250 MB database + 10 GB file storage per instance |
| **DigitalOcean** smallest Droplet (do-it-yourself) | $4/mo (512 MB) — $6/mo (1 GB) recommended | A small Linux server; you copy the one file up and run it; their docs + one AI session can do the setup |

PocketBase's own data lives in one folder (`pb_data`) next to the
program. Moving hosts = copy that folder. No export wizard, no lock-in
fee, and the same folder copy is your backup — make one before every
host change and on a schedule after.

## The total a first app actually costs

- Building: **$0** (PocketBase MIT, your machine, free frontend tier).
- Live for the public: **about $4–10/month**, all of it the backend's
  always-on home — against the remembered beginner stack of separate
  auth + database + storage services and a $5–25/mo server under them.
- The thing that actually bankrupts beginners is not hosting. It's
  credits burned re-fixing login (see README). That's the cost this
  pack exists to remove.

## When you outgrow this

Thousands of daily users, or data you must not lose, changes the
answer (managed databases, real backups, maybe a bigger server). That
is a good problem, it is not a first-app problem, and this pack does
not pretend to solve it.