Best Free Redis for Serverless Apps

Free Redis hosting for caching and rate limiting.

Finding free Redis for serverless apps has gotten harder. Most providers dropped their free tiers or heavily rate-limited them. But a few solid options remain for caching and rate limiting.

Quick Comparison

Upstash: 10K commands/mo free | Redis Cloud: 30MB tier | Cloudflare Workers KV: 1GB storage, 100K writes/day

Upstash

The best option for serverless. Built specifically for that use case. Offers both Redis and Kafka. Free tier gives 10K commands monthly — enough for moderate traffic. Integrates natively with Cloudflare Workers, Vercel, and Netlify.

Pros: Great DX, built-in analytics, Kafka for messaging. Cons: Can hit limits fast with high traffic.

Redis Cloud

From the makers of Redis. Their free tier gives 30MB — tiny but functional. Works everywhere Redis does. Good option if you need full Redis compatibility.

Pros: Full Redis compatibility, well-maintained. Cons: Very limited storage, aggressive rate limits.

Cloudflare Workers KV

Not true Redis, but works for simple key-value. 1GB free storage, 100K daily writes. Best if you are already on Cloudflare Workers.

Pros: Generous limits, integrated. Cons: Higher latency than Redis, different API.