How Clearvia Zero works

Clearvia Zero tells you which official free plans you can build on, and what can go wrong with them. This page explains where the facts come from, how fresh they are, how the planner ranks plans, and the rules we hold ourselves to.

What we record

For every official free plan in the catalog we record:

• What it includes: the limits that decide whether a project fits, such as storage, requests, users, emails or tokens, with the period they reset over.
• What happens at the limit: whether requests are refused, the project is paused, usage is slowed down, or overage is billed, and whether a hard cap keeps you at $0.
• Lifecycle: whether idle projects are paused and whether free resources are deleted after a time, and whether that clock counts days without activity or days since creation.
• Who can sign up: whether a card, a phone number, an ID check or a registered business is needed, and any region restrictions.
• What the terms allow: commercial use and, for AI models, whether your inputs are used for training.
• Mainland China: whether the service is reachable, whether its default domain is blocked, and whether serving mainland visitors needs an ICP filing.

Evidence for every fact

• Every stated fact carries a verbatim quote from the provider's own pages (pricing, documentation or terms), with the address of the page and the time it was captured. Open Source next to any fact to read it.
• When a page does not say something, the record says unknown. We do not guess, and unknown values count against a plan in the planner.
• Quotes must come from the provider's official domains. The only outside sources we accept are independent reachability testers (GreatFire) for mainland-China facts, and a provider's own ICP filing number as proof that it operates in mainland China.

Mainland China ratings

Reachability rests on GreatFire's tests of the hosts your users actually reach: the API endpoint, or the default domain a project is served from.

• Reachable: GreatFire finds those hosts accessible.
• Partly reachable: results are mixed, or the hosts open only some of the time.
• Blocked: GreatFire finds them blocked. When it is only the provider's default domain, the record says so separately, because a custom domain may still work.
• Not verified: GreatFire has not tested the relevant hosts, or too few pages to tell.

GreatFire tests web requests (HTTP and HTTPS) only: direct database connections and mobile push delivery are not measured, and custom domains are not assessed unless the record says so. The daily check reads GreatFire's verdicts like any other quote, so a changed verdict puts the record under review.

Two clocks: verified and confirmed

Freshness is shown on every record, and the two clocks are never merged:

• Verified means a machine re-read the source pages and found every quote of the record still there.
• Confirmed means a person reviewed the record and signed it off.

A record is shown as Confirmed while a person has reviewed it in the last 90 days, as Verified while a machine has matched its quotes in the last 30 days, and as Stale otherwise. Stale records stay listed with a warning and rank lower.

The machine check runs every day. It identifies itself as ClearviaZeroBot, reads each source page in the language the quote was taken in (PDFs included) and looks for every quote word for word. A quote that is no longer there opens a review: the record is marked Under review wherever it appears, the affected facts are flagged, and it ranks lower until a person has corrected it. A few sites refuse automated checks; facts from those pages stay fresh only when a person confirms them.

How the planner ranks

The planner is deterministic: the same request gives the same plan on the website, in the API and in your coding agent.

1. It rules out what you excluded. Non-commercial plans when your project will make money, plans that need a card or a phone check if you said no, plans that pause idle projects, model APIs that train on your inputs, and services blocked in mainland China when your users are there.
2. It scores the rest with neutral factors. Free with no end date scores higher than trials and credits. A plan that cannot bill you scores higher than one that bills overage without a cap. Pauses, deletion, card and identity checks lower the score; deletion of an abandoned account costs less than deletion by age. Unknown terms cost a little, and stale records cost more.
3. It checks your scale. If you state expected usage, each plan is compared with its free limits. Plans you would outgrow are marked over the limit, and headroom is shown for each one.
4. It compares generosity. Among plans for the same need, more generous limits on the metrics that matter for that need score higher.

Plans their provider is retiring rank after every plan that stays open, so a new stack is never built on one. Such a plan is chosen only when nothing else fits, or when you name it, and it always carries the warning.

Ties are broken by freshness, then generosity, then name. Alternatives favour different providers, so you always see a real choice.

Money never moves a ranking

Clearvia will earn money from providers who pay for verification of their listing or for sponsored slots, and from some referral links. None of it is an input to the planner: the ranking code has no commercial fields at all.

• Referral links are labelled wherever they appear, and the number of offers with a referral link is published with the catalog figures.
• Sponsored slots are always labelled and never placed inside ranked lists.

Changes

Every edit to the catalog is a reviewed change. Each change is classified by what it means for a project that wants to stay at $0, as better, worse or neutral, and as breaking, notice or info, and published in the change feed.

What we never do

• Pool, resell or broker free quotas.
• Run accounts on your behalf or automate sign-ups.
• List unofficial relays, mirrors or resellers of other services.
• Rank by payment.

Corrections

Every fact links to its source, so you can check it yourself. If something is wrong or out of date, tell us through the contact page with the page that shows it. The record is corrected in a reviewed change, which appears in the change feed labelled as a correction, so anyone who relied on the old record can see what was wrong.