Short answer: no free platform in this comparison guarantees an unlimited, interruption-free Telegram bot forever. Oracle Cloud Always Free is the closest match if your account is approved and capacity is available, but its current allowance is limited to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory in your home region. Render’s free service sleeps, while Railway’s free plan is a small usage credit rather than unlimited compute. For predictable uptime and full control, a small paid VPS costing roughly $5–$10 per month is the practical choice.
This guide compares the real limits, explains which hosting model fits polling or webhooks, and gives a production-minded systemd setup that automatically restarts a bot and keeps credentials out of your code.
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A bot is only 24/7 when its process remains reachable, can restart after a crash or host reboot, and retains whatever state your application needs. “Free” hosting often changes one of those conditions: the service may sleep when no web traffic arrives, stop when a monthly credit is consumed, restrict storage, or reclaim an idle virtual machine.
Telegram does not normally charge a separate hosting fee for Bot API requests; your direct costs are usually the compute service, optional storage or a domain, and any AI or other third-party APIs your bot calls. Treat that cost distinction separately from the host’s free-tier marketing.
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Free options versus a VPS at a glance
| Option | Always-on behavior | Persistent storage | Published cost or allowance | Control and friction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle Cloud Always Free (Ampere A1) | Can stay running, subject to approval, regional capacity, reclaim rules and account limits | Virtual-machine storage is available, but free capacity and reclaim policy must be checked in your account | Up to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB memory total in the home region under the current allowance | Full virtual-machine control; sign-up and capacity can be difficult |
| Render free web service | Spins down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic; wake-up takes about one minute | No persistent disk | 750 free instance hours per workspace per calendar month; free services are suspended after that | Simple deployment, but limited to one instance and not recommended for production |
| Railway Free | Metered runtime; the included credit can run out | Use the plan’s metered volumes and service limits; no unlimited free disk is promised | $1 monthly credit after a one-time $5 trial credit that lasts up to 30 days; one service is limited to 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM and one replica | Convenient platform workflow, less host-level control; overage becomes a bill |
| Small paid VPS | Runs continuously until you stop it or the provider has an outage | Persistent virtual disk, subject to the plan and your backups | Blog pricing surveys commonly place small plans around $5–$10 per month | Full Linux, systemd, logs and networking control; you maintain updates and security |
Oracle Cloud Always Free: the strongest no-cost candidate
What you get now
Oracle’s current Always Free documentation says existing Arm-based instances must total no more than 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory to remain within the free allowance. The instances must be provisioned in your tenancy’s home region. That is enough for a lightweight Python, Node.js or Go bot, a small database, and monitoring, provided you keep memory usage modest.
An older allowance of 4 OCPUs and 24 GB is described in an Oracle Cloud Customer Connect community post. That is not an official current limit, so do not plan capacity around it. Configure your tenancy for the currently documented 2-OCPU/12-GB ceiling instead.
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Why it is not guaranteed
- Account approval and payment-card verification can prevent sign-up or delay provisioning.
- Arm capacity is regional. A free shape may be unavailable in your home region even when the offer exists.
- Instances over the allowance can be disabled and deleted after 30 days unless the account is upgraded.
- Oracle has discussed reclaiming idle free resources, so an apparently idle bot should not be treated as permanently protected.
Community posts cite different enforcement dates—June 15, 2026 and August 18, 2026. No official date confirming either claim was established, so regard both as unverified and monitor notices in your account.
Capacity context for paid tenancies
An Oracle Cloud price-list search excerpt lists 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB-hours per month free for Ampere A1 Compute in a paid tenancy. That figure comes from a search excerpt rather than a full recheck of the price page and should be verified before you use it for budgeting. It does not remove the approval, region or reclaim considerations attached to free resources.
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Best use case
Choose Oracle first when your priority is a genuinely long-running process at zero monthly compute cost and you are willing to handle cloud-console provisioning, Linux administration and the possibility that capacity or policy changes will force a move. Keep an export of your instance configuration and a copy of your bot code so migration to a VPS is quick.
Render free service: easy deployment, not an always-on worker
Sleep and wake behavior
A free Render web service spins down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic and takes about one minute to wake. A Telegram bot using long polling does not provide the kind of continuous inbound web traffic that prevents this sleep, so polling will be interrupted. A webhook can wake a service when an HTTPS request arrives, but the first request after sleep still experiences the wake delay.
Monthly and storage limits
Each workspace receives 750 free instance hours per calendar month. Once those hours are consumed, all free web services in that workspace are suspended until the next month. Free services cannot scale beyond one instance and have no persistent disk. A free Render Postgres database expires 30 days after creation, making it unsuitable as the sole home for durable bot state.
Render’s own free-instance guidance says these services are not for production applications. Use the free tier for demos, development, or a bot where delayed responses and lost local files are acceptable—not for a support, alerting or payment workflow that must answer at any hour.
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When Render still makes sense
- You are testing deployment and want a simple Git-based workflow.
- Your bot is webhook-based and a one-minute cold start is acceptable.
- All important state is stored in an external durable database and the bot can reconnect cleanly.
- You have a separate uptime or scheduled trigger, understanding that attempts to defeat free-tier sleep may violate provider policy and still will not create a guarantee.
Railway Free: a credit, not unlimited hosting
Published plan structure
Railway lists a $0 Free plan with $1 of monthly credit, a $5 Hobby plan and a $20 Pro plan. A one-time $5 trial credit is available for up to 30 days. The official description is preferable to a blog claim that characterizes this as a one-time verification charge.
The Free plan limits each service to 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB of RAM and one replica. Railway meters resources rather than promising an always-on free process. Once the $1 credit is used, the service can stop or require payment, depending on the account’s billing state.
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How metering affects a bot
Railway’s published rates include $10 per GB of RAM per month, $20 per vCPU per month, $0.05 per GB of network egress and $0.15 per GB of volume storage per month. A bot that runs continuously can therefore exceed the $1 credit even with low traffic. One blog author reported paying about $1.80–$2.40 per month for a bot, but that is anecdotal and depends on resource size, uptime and egress. A Render comparison claiming the $1 credit covers only a few hours is vendor marketing, not an independent guarantee.
Best use case
Railway is appropriate when you value a fast deployment path and can accept a small, variable monthly bill. Set a billing alert, cap resources, and confirm what happens when credit is exhausted before putting alerts or customer conversations on the service. If you need a hard monthly ceiling, a fixed-price VPS is easier to reason about.
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A cheap VPS: the predictable 24/7 option
What the price buys
Blog pricing surveys commonly place an entry-level VPS around $5 per month, with a broader small-plan range of $5–$10 per month. These are market reports rather than official price quotations, so check the provider’s current region, billing cycle, IPv4 charge and backup fees before ordering.
Unlike a PaaS free service, a VPS gives you a complete Linux machine. You can run systemd, inspect journal logs, choose your process supervisor, install a database, set firewall rules and schedule backups. The trade-off is responsibility: you must patch the operating system, protect SSH, rotate secrets and monitor disk usage.
Why a VPS is usually better for one serious bot
- Stable process: no inactivity sleep or tiny monthly runtime credit.
- Restart policy: systemd can start the bot after a crash or reboot.
- Persistent disk: local SQLite files, downloaded media and logs survive a process restart; still back them up because a VPS disk is not a backup.
- Portability: a standard Linux service is easier to move than a platform-specific build configuration.
- Clear budgeting: the base instance price is predictable, while bandwidth, backups and add-ons remain separate line items.
Polling or webhook: choose the delivery method before hosting
Long polling
Polling keeps an outbound connection to Telegram and asks for updates repeatedly. It normally needs no domain name or HTTPS certificate, which makes it the simplest choice on a VPS or virtual machine. The process must stay alive; if the host sleeps or the process exits, updates wait until it reconnects.
Webhooks
A webhook sends updates to a public HTTPS endpoint. You need a reachable domain or hostname, a valid certificate and an application server that accepts Telegram’s requests. Webhooks fit platforms designed around HTTP services, but a sleeping free service can introduce a cold-start delay.
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Run only one consumer per token
Operate one polling process or one webhook endpoint for each bot token. Accidentally running two pollers commonly produces update conflicts or missed delivery. During migration, stop the old process before starting the new one, then verify that only one service is receiving updates.
Recommended VPS setup with systemd
The following pattern works for a small Linux VPS and can be adapted to an Always Free virtual machine. Replace paths and the account name with your own values.
- Create a dedicated user and application directory. Do not run the bot as root. Create a user such as
telegrambot, place code in/opt/telegram-bot, and make that user the owner. - Create an isolated Python environment. From the application directory, create
.venvand install your pinned dependencies. A virtualenv prevents a package upgrade for another application from breaking the bot. - Store the token in a protected environment file. Create
/etc/telegram-bot.envcontainingTELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=your-token. Set ownership so only the service user and root can read it, and never commit it to Git or paste it into issue trackers. - Test interactively. Run the bot as the service user, send it a message, and confirm that polling or webhook delivery works before creating an automatic service.
- Create the systemd unit. Save a unit such as the following as
/etc/systemd/system/telegram-bot.service:
[Unit]
Description=Telegram bot
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target
[Service]
User=telegrambot
WorkingDirectory=/opt/telegram-bot
EnvironmentFile=/etc/telegram-bot.env
ExecStart=/opt/telegram-bot/.venv/bin/python bot.py
Restart=always
RestartSec=5
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target- Enable and start it. Run
sudo systemctl daemon-reload, thensudo systemctl enable --now telegram-bot. - Read logs and status. Use
sudo systemctl status telegram-botfor the current state andsudo journalctl -u telegram-bot -fto follow output. A restart loop usually means a bad token, missing dependency, wrong working directory or an exception during startup. - Verify reboot recovery. After updates, reboot during a maintenance window and confirm the service returns automatically. Check that your bot answers a message and that only one instance is active.
Security and reliability checklist
- Use SSH keys, disable password login where practical, and restrict the firewall to the ports you actually need.
- Apply operating-system and language-runtime security updates on a schedule.
- Keep the bot token in an environment file or secret manager with restrictive permissions; rotate it immediately if exposed.
- Set log rotation so a verbose bot cannot fill the disk.
- Back up databases and configuration off the VPS. A persistent disk protects against process restarts, not provider failure or accidental deletion.
- Add an application-level health check that records the last successful Telegram interaction and alerts you when it becomes stale.
- Pin dependency versions and test upgrades in a separate directory before replacing the running environment.
Common failure modes and fixes
The “free” bot stops after a quiet period
This is the expected behavior of a sleeping PaaS service, especially Render. Move the worker to Oracle Always Free or a paid VPS, or accept the cold-start delay and design the bot to reconnect and recover state.
Oracle cannot provision an instance
Try again later or assess another availability domain in your home region if the console permits it. Do not assume that changing regions preserves the Always Free allowance; the documented free placement is the home region. If capacity remains unavailable, use a small VPS rather than repeatedly rebuilding the application.
The service runs until the end of the month, then stops
That symptom matches Railway credit exhaustion or Render’s 750-hour workspace limit. Inspect the provider’s usage page, set alerts before deployment, and decide whether to add a paid plan or migrate to a fixed-price VPS.
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Stop every old process, verify that only one poller or webhook endpoint uses the token, and inspect logs for update-conflict errors. During a host migration, change the process in a controlled order instead of starting both machines simultaneously.
Messages arrive but the bot forgets state
Do not rely on ephemeral storage. Render free services have no persistent disk, and free databases can expire. Put durable state in a database with a documented retention policy and test restoring a backup.
Quick Recap
Which option should you choose?
Choose Oracle Always Free when
- You can obtain an approved account and an Ampere instance in the home region.
- Your bot fits comfortably inside 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory total.
- You accept the possibility of capacity limits, policy changes and reclaim enforcement.
- You are comfortable administering Linux and maintaining a migration backup.
Choose Railway when
- You want the simplest deployment and can tolerate a variable bill.
- Your bot is small enough for 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB RAM.
- You will monitor the $1 monthly credit and upgrade or shut down before unexpected usage accumulates.
Choose Render free when
- You are prototyping, demonstrating or running a non-critical webhook bot.
- A one-minute wake-up and non-persistent local storage are acceptable.
- You do not need production-grade uptime or a durable free database.
Choose a $5–$10 VPS when
- The bot handles alerts, support, payments or community moderation where missed messages matter.
- You need systemd, full logs, persistent disk and a predictable always-on process.
- You can perform routine patching, backups and secret management.
Migration plan if a free host stops working
- Export code, dependency lockfiles, environment-variable names, database dumps and any webhook configuration.
- Provision the VPS and create the service user, virtualenv and firewall rules.
- Restore the database and copy only the required secrets through an encrypted channel.
- Stop the old bot before starting the new one so two consumers never share a token.
- Start the systemd service, send test messages and inspect logs for delivery errors.
- Keep the old account untouched for a short rollback window, then delete unused instances and revoke credentials.
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