tl;dr¶
Starting in January 2026, all free accounts will shift to community-powered support instead of direct support and will have some reduced features. If you want to upgrade, you can lock in the current $5/month (€5/month in the EU system) Hacker plan rate before January 8 (EU) or January 15 (US). After that, the base paid tier will be $10/month (€10/month in the EU system).
If you’re currently a paying customer, you can learn more about the new pricing tiers and guidance for current customers here.
What PythonAnywhere Has Come to Mean for the Community¶
Over time, PythonAnywhere has become a place where people learn, teach, experiment, and deploy projects, all with nothing more than a browser. Students use it for coursework, teachers for classrooms, hobbyists for tinkering, and developers for prototyping and hosting apps. That breadth of use has always reminded us why we built this in the first place: to make Python more accessible.
We’re proud of our free tier, which has stayed meaningful rather than token. The feedback from both free and paid users has helped us improve the platform far beyond what we could have done alone. The goal has always been the same: give people a simple, reliable place to turn ideas into running code.
What’s Changing for Free Accounts¶
Our community has grown beyond what we imagined when we started, which is wonderful. But as a small team, we’ve reached a point where we need to adjust how we support free accounts so we can keep offering them while investing in the features and platform upgrades you’ve been requesting.
Free accounts will continue to exist and remain functional. You’ll still be able to build, learn, and host projects. However, starting in January 2026, we’re making the following changes:
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Community-powered support. We are no longer able to offer direct support for free accounts. Instead, we’ll point you toward our forums and community resources where other users can help. You can find a complete list of resources on our help pages (also available as an llms.txt) where we’ve built out a number of tutorials. Additionally, these help pages are available in our public GitHub repository, so you are welcome to open an issue or contribute directly.
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Feature changes. For new users, scheduled tasks and MySQL database access will now be in the Developer tier. Unused web apps will expire after 1 month, rather than 3 months.
If you’re currently on the free tier and want to upgrade, you can lock in the current Hacker tier rate of $5/month (€5/month in the EU system) if you upgrade before the pricing changes take effect:
- January 8, 2026 for EU system users
- January 15, 2026 for US system users
On 8/15 January no existing free account features will change.
After these dates, the base paid tier will be $10/month (or €10/month in the EU system). So if you’ve been thinking about upgrading, now is the time to lock in the current lower rate.
We know this is a significant change, and we don’t make it lightly. But here’s what it allows us to do: reallocate our development time toward upgrading the core service (newer Python versions, Django, MySQL, Postgres), continuing to build on existing features like the MCP integration, and securing the platform against emerging threats.
Thank you for being part of this journey, from that accidental pivot in 2011 to wherever we’re headed next.
The PythonAnywhere Team
