There is no permanently free RedminePRO tier — the trial is 7 days and requires a card, with billing starting on day 8 unless you cancel. Here is exactly what free options exist for Redmine, including ours, and what each really costs.
Here is the short version, before anything else on this page. RedminePRO's trial is 7 days and requires a card. Billing starts automatically on day 8 unless you cancel. That is a trial, not a free plan, and we are not going to call it free. There is no permanently free RedminePRO plan; the cheapest paid plan is $29/month for up to 25 users with unlimited projects.
The rest of this page is what “free Redmine hosting” actually means across the market — what the free options are, what each of them costs you in ways that aren't on the invoice, and when free stops being the cheaper choice.
Three different things, regularly confused. Since RedminePRO has no standing free tier, here is the honest two-way comparison: the 7-day trial against the cheapest paid plan.
| 7-day trial | Startup — $29/mo | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | $0 for 7 days, then billed | $29/month, or $290/year (2 months free) |
| Card required to start | Yes | Yes |
| What happens at the end | Billing begins automatically on day 8 unless you cancel | Renews until you cancel |
| Users | Up to 25 (the plan you pick) | Up to 25 |
| Projects | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Storage | Plan allowance (50 GB on Startup) | 50 GB |
| Full Redmine admin access | Yes | Yes |
| Region choice (US / EU / India) | Yes | Yes |
| Managed upgrades and patching | Yes | Yes |
| Encrypted backups, point-in-time recovery | Yes | Yes |
| 24x7 support | Yes | Yes |
| Done-for-you migration service | Yes | Yes |
| Keep your data when you convert | Yes — everything carries over | — |
The trial is not a limited edition of the product. It is the full plan you picked, for 7 days, and everything you build during it stays when you subscribe. The only thing you have to remember is the date: cancel before day 8 and you are not charged. Start a 7-day trial or see all plans and pricing.
Redmine is free software. Redmine hosting is not, and the gap between those two facts is where most of the confusion on this search lives.
Running Redmine for someone else costs real money every month: an EC2 instance, a managed database, storage that grows, backups of that storage, bandwidth, TLS, monitoring, and an engineer who understands Ruby on Rails when the upgrade fails. None of that goes to zero because the application is open source. So when a provider offers Redmine hosting for free, that cost is being recovered somewhere. It is worth knowing where. The four patterns you will meet:
1. The free tier that is really a lead magnet. Two or three users, one project, a storage cap you hit in a month. Fine for evaluating; not a place to run a team. Planio, for example, offers a free 2-user tier (plan.io, as of 2 August 2026) — genuinely free, genuinely small.
2. The “free” that is a trial. Most results on this search. Card up front, a countdown, automatic billing at the end. Nothing wrong with it, as long as it says so — which is why we say so at the top of this page rather than in footnote 4.
3. The free service that stops being free. This one is not hypothetical. HostedRedmine.com was the best-known free Redmine host for years. It has been acquired by Planio — its own homepage now reads “HostedRedmine.com has joined Planio!” — and it is no longer an independent free option. If a guide sent you here recommending it, that guide is out of date.
4. The shared instance. Free, but you are one tenant among thousands on hardware sized for the average, with no admin access, no plugin control, no region choice, and backups you cannot verify. The cost is paid in the days you lose when it goes down.
None of these are scams. They are just different answers to the same unavoidable question — who pays for the server. Read any free Redmine offer by asking that question first.
The genuinely free option is the one people forget to price: download Redmine, put it on your own server, and run it yourself. The software licence is €0 forever. The rest is not. What self-hosting actually costs, in the order you meet it:
The server. A VPS or EC2 instance, plus a database, plus disk that grows with attachments, plus a second location for backups. Small, but monthly, and it never stops.
The setup. Ruby, Rails, bundler, a database, a web server, TLS certificates and their renewal, SMTP that doesn't land in spam, and the first round of “why does the plugin not load”. This is a day of skilled work if it goes well.
The upgrades. Redmine ships new versions and Rails ships security patches. Someone has to run each upgrade, test the plugins against it, and have a rollback ready when one of them breaks. This is the cost people underestimate most, because it is not a one-time cost — it recurs, unpredictably, forever, and it always lands in the middle of something else.
The patching. OS and dependency CVEs. Unpatched, an internet-facing Redmine with your customer data in it is a liability. Patched, it is somebody's unbudgeted evening, several times a year.
The backups you have never tested. A backup that has not been restored is a hypothesis. Point-in-time recovery — being able to restore to 14:19 because someone bulk-edited 400 issues at 14:20 — is meaningfully harder to build than a nightly mysqldump to the same disk.
The person. All of the above needs someone who knows Rails, is available when it breaks, and does not go on holiday during a CVE. In most teams this is a developer doing it instead of their actual job.
Add those up honestly against $29/month for up to 25 users and the arithmetic usually resolves quickly. We are not going to publish a fabricated total-cost-of-ownership figure — your server prices and your engineer's hourly rate are yours, not ours. Price your own two hours a month and compare.
Self-hosting is still the right answer for some teams — air-gapped networks, a hard requirement to hold the data on your own metal, or an existing platform team for whom one more Rails app is genuinely marginal. If that is you, self-host. It is the same open-source Redmine either way, and if you change your mind later, we migrate you.
Free tiers and trials both end the same way: you outgrow them, or the clock runs out. The upgrade path is deliberately boring.
See all plans · How migration works · Security and compliance · How we compare
Seven days of the full plan, card required. Done-for-you migration if you're moving from somewhere else, quoted after a free assessment.