Free places to run your own pods.

Fleet pods normally run on a paid sandbox provider. For your own, trusted agents you can run a pod host yourself on a free machine instead. These are the places we checked, and the catch for each.

inferenceAI models
fleetsandbox pods
hostfree hosting for fleet pods

Where

Hugging Face Space

Use this
2 vCPU, 16 GB, Docker · no card

Free with no card. It has a public https address, so fleet can call it with no tunnel and no machine of yours.

Catch: Sleeps when idle. Pods share one container, so trusted code only.

Oracle Always Free

Needs a card
up to 4 Arm CPUs, 24 GB (vendor figure, may be lower in your region) · card needed

The biggest free machine. A whole VM, so Docker and gVisor work and pods can be isolated.

Catch: Asks for a card to check who you are, and capacity can be tight.

Render free web service

Limited
0.1 vCPU, 512 MB · no card

Easy to deploy from a Dockerfile.

Catch: Our free hours ran out on 2026-11-12, and it sleeps after 15 minutes idle.

Koyeb free instance

Not tried
small

Offers a free web service.

Catch: We have not tried it. Check their page for card rules and limits first.

Fly.io

Needs a card
small VMs · card needed

Fast to start, many regions.

Catch: Needs a card before any machine is created.

Cloudflare Containers

container sizes · card needed

Runs next to fleet.

Catch: Needs the paid Workers plan.

Checked 2026-11-13 from each vendor's public page and our own tries. Limits change: read the vendor's page before you rely on one. Pods on these hosts are not sandboxes: use them for your own agents, never for strangers' code.

Set up a Hugging Face Space in 4 steps

  1. Make a Space at huggingface.co/new-space, SDK Docker, free hardware, keep it public.
  2. Add fleetd.mjs from the fleet repo and this Dockerfile:
    FROM node:20-slim
    RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends python3 git curl ca-certificates && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
    USER node
    WORKDIR /home/node/app
    COPY --chown=node fleetd.mjs .
    ENV PORT=7860
    EXPOSE 7860
    CMD ["node", "fleetd.mjs"]
  3. In the Space settings add a secret FLEETD_TOKEN: any random string of 16 or more characters.
  4. In fleet, connect the provider Fleet pod with token@https://your-name-your-space.hf.space. Check it first: curl https://your-name-your-space.hf.space/health answers {"ok":true}.