Keep a Discord Bot Online for Free: Replit Alternatives

Why your bot goes offline

A Discord bot is a program that has to be running all the time, connected to Discord and waiting for messages. If the program stops, the bot shows as offline and doesn't reply (if it's online and still doesn't reply, that's something else: my Discord bot isn't responding).

The free tiers of platforms built for websites, like Replit or Render, put your program to sleep when nobody visits its page: on Render, after 15 minutes without visits. A bot gets no visits (it's the one connecting to Discord), so to the platform it looks “idle” and gets put to sleep. On top of that, Render's background workers, which is exactly what a bot is, have no free version.

The keep_alive trick, and why it fails

Many tutorials add a small web server to the bot (the famous keep_alive.py with Flask, or an Express server in Node.js) plus an outside service that visits it every few minutes so it doesn't fall asleep.

It works some of the time: the platform can still restart or stop it whenever it likes, the bot drops for a few seconds or minutes on every restart, and you depend on two free services at once. If yours disconnects on its own several times a day, this is almost certainly why.

Free options that really keep it online

Your computer: free and with no limits, but the bot goes offline when you switch the computer off or the connection drops. Good for writing and testing it.

A Raspberry Pi or another small computer at home: a command bot runs easily on a Raspberry Pi and uses a few watts, a few euros of electricity a year (work it out with the electricity cost calculator). It has to stay on and connected, and the bot should restart itself if it crashes (how, below).

Free machines from cloud providers, like Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier: a virtual machine of your own, but it asks for a card to sign up, you have to install and maintain the system, and Oracle can reclaim free machines it sees as idle (under 20 % CPU for 7 days), and a bot barely uses any CPU.

Railway gives a small free credit each month (1 dollar on its free plan), which isn't enough to keep a program running the whole month.

A bot host, like the NapNodes free bot (in the next section): the bot stays online with no web server or pings, and you only have to renew it once a week.

If it's on a Raspberry Pi: make it restart itself

On Raspberry Pi OS (or any Linux with systemd), create this file with “sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/mybot.service”, changing the folder, the user and the command to yours (for Python, ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 main.py). Then run “sudo systemctl enable --now mybot”: the bot starts when the Raspberry Pi boots and comes back on its own after 5 seconds if it crashes. “journalctl -u mybot -f” shows what it prints.

[Unit]
Description=My Discord bot
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
User=pi
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi/mybot
ExecStart=/usr/bin/node index.js
Restart=always
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

With the NapNodes free bot

1. Create your account and pick the free bot

   No card. It has 256 MB of memory, plenty for a command or moderation bot. There's one per person; if there are no free spots left, you join the waiting list and it's created as soon as there's room.

2. Remove the keep_alive

   You don't need it here: the bot stays online even if nobody visits anything. You can delete the web server and the outside ping from your code.

3. Upload the code and pick the language

   Node.js or Python, in “Settings” → “Language” (the version, in “Version & startup”). The code goes in “Files” or comes from your GitHub repository, which is also set in “Settings”; the dependencies in package.json or requirements.txt install themselves at startup. The token goes in a .env, never in a public repository.

4. Start it and renew it every week

   With “Start” it stays online. Every 7 days you renew it with one click (“Start” or “Renew now” in the panel); we email you the day before. If you don't renew it, it stops, but it isn't deleted; only after 14 days without renewing, and with a warning first.

When to move to a plan

If you'd rather not have to remember to renew it, or your bot needs more memory (lots of servers, big caches), the Mini (512 MB) and Plus (1 GB) plans stay online with nothing to renew, and no contract (pricing). How to set it up, in the Discord bot hosting guide.

Frequently asked questions