Spin-Down

Spin-down policies are how container hosts make free tiers sustainable. Render free web services spin down after 15 minutes idle; the next request takes 30+ seconds to wake the container. Supabase free projects pause after 7 days inactive; you must manually click to wake. The cost to your project is the cost of the first impression. A user who clicks your link from Twitter and waits 30 seconds for a blank page usually closes the tab before your container finishes booting. For SaaS and consumer-facing products, spin-down is a deal breaker. Workarounds: cron-pinging your service to keep it warm (works on Render, GitHub Actions runs free), keeping a small paid plan ($7-10/month) that doesn't spin down, or choosing a host that doesn't spin down free tier (Koyeb's free tier stays on, Cloudflare Workers have no concept of spin-down). Spin-down is fine for: internal tools, CI runners, scheduled jobs, dev environments. Spin-down is not fine for: anything a user might land on cold.