Most "free" tiers from major cloud providers expire after 12 months or require you to upgrade after hitting low limits.
In the world of Discord music bots, Lavalink has become the gold standard. Unlike older music bots that relied on direct YouTube scraping (which often breaks), Lavalink is a standalone audio sending node designed to work with Discord’s voice system. It is powerful, stable, and efficient. Lavalink Hosting Free
However, if you have ever tried to build your own music bot, you hit the same wall: Traditional hosting (AWS, DigitalOcean, VPS) costs money. For hobbyists, students, or small Discord communities, the question is always the same: Is there such a thing as Lavalink Hosting that is truly free? Most "free" tiers from major cloud providers expire
Lavalink requires a persistent file system for caching? Not really. But it does require constant uptime. Railway is better suited for web apps that sleep. If your Lavalink sleeps, your bot disconnects. It is powerful, stable, and efficient
The short answer is
is similar but designed for APIs. Neither is truly ideal for a long-running audio node.