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Is your Render app sleeping?

Paste your .onrender.com address. If the service is awake you'll know in a second — if it's spun down, you'll watch the cold start happen and get the exact number of seconds your visitors wait.

Why Render apps go to sleep

Free web services on Render spin down after 15 minutes without traffic. The instance is stopped completely — and the next request is held at Render's router while a fresh one boots, which takes anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute. Your app didn't crash and nothing is broken; it's just asleep, and the first visitor after every quiet stretch pays the wake-up bill.

For a portfolio site that's an awkward pause. For an API, a demo you linked in a job application, or anything receiving webhooks, it reads as down — most webhook senders and plenty of humans give up long before second forty.

How to stop it spinning down

Two honest options. Pay for an instance that never sleeps — or make sure the service never sees 15 quiet minutes. Steady traffic resets the idle timer, which is why the standard trick is an uptime monitor pinging every 60 seconds. Render's free plan includes 750 instance-hours a month: exactly enough to keep one service awake around the clock.

The monitor buys you the second thing too: if the service ever stops answering because something actually broke, you find out from an email — not from the person your demo link just failed in front of.

Never let it fall asleep again.

Join Tell Me When Down free and we'll ping your Render service every 60 seconds — it never sits idle long enough to spin down, and if it goes down for real, you get an email.

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Render spin-down, answered

Does Render's free tier spin down after inactivity?

Yes. A free web service on Render spins down after 15 minutes without incoming traffic. The instance is stopped entirely — the next request has to wait for it to boot before getting an answer. Paid instances never spin down.

Why does my Render app take a minute to load?

That's a cold start. After 15 quiet minutes Render stops your free instance; the next visitor's request is held by Render's router while a fresh instance boots, installs, and starts listening. Once it's up, it stays fast — until the next 15-minute gap.

How long does a Render cold start take?

Render says spin-up can take up to a minute; in practice most cold starts land between 30 and 60 seconds depending on your app's boot time. Measuring yours is the point of this page — the checker reports the real number when it catches your service asleep.

How do I prevent Render from spinning down?

Two options: upgrade the service to a paid instance (they never sleep), or make sure it never goes 15 minutes without traffic. The common trick is an uptime monitor pinging it every minute — that's real traffic, so the idle timer never fires. Render's free plan includes 750 instance-hours a month, which is exactly enough to keep one service running around the clock.

Do webhooks fail while a Render service is asleep?

This is the quiet damage: most webhook senders time out after a few seconds, far less than a 30–60 second cold start. Some (like Stripe) retry later, so you may only lose latency; others don't retry, and that event is simply gone. If your service receives webhooks, spin-down isn't a cosmetic problem.

Is it allowed to ping my Render app to keep it awake?

Pinging your own service is ordinary traffic — nothing in Render's terms forbids it. The real cost is your free 750 monthly instance-hours: a service that never sleeps uses about 730 of them, so the budget covers exactly one always-on service per month.

one request to your service · checking a sleeping service wakes it · not affiliated with Render