Why does my Streamlit Community Cloud app go to sleep?

The free tier suspends apps that have not been visited recently and wakes them on the next request, which is why a stakeholder opening your link at 9am sees a spinner and a wake-up message. It is the expected behaviour of a free shared platform, not a misconfiguration.

Can a Streamlit Community Cloud app be private?

The free service is built around public sharing from a public repo, with a limited viewer allowlist. If the data is confidential, plan on self-hosting the app or on publishing the rendered output instead of the live app.

Does my stakeholder actually need the interactive app?

Often not. A large share of internal Streamlit apps are read-only dashboards with a date filter. If nobody changes the inputs, exporting the rendered result to an HTML report removes the runtime, the sleeping, the cold start and the access problem in one step.

What is the simplest private alternative?

For a live app: self-host the container behind your own SSO, or a managed app platform. For a read-only view: publish the rendered HTML to a destination with per-report visibility and comments, which needs no runtime at all.

Streamlit Community Cloud alternatives

Community Cloud is a remarkable free service: push to GitHub, get a running app, no infrastructure. For demos, portfolios and open-source projects it is hard to argue with.

It starts to hurt in two places. The app sleeps, so the person you sent it to gets a spinner instead of numbers. And it is built around public sharing from a public repo, which is not where the quarterly figures live.

The two failure modes

"It was loading for a minute." Free apps suspend when idle and wake on demand. The first visitor of the day absorbs the cold start — usually the executive you most wanted to impress.

"Can this be internal-only?" The free tier's model is public sharing with a small viewer allowlist. Real access control means moving to self-hosting or a paid platform.

There is also a third, quieter one: most of these apps are not interactive. They render a table, a chart and a date picker nobody touches. Paying a runtime cost for interactivity that goes unused is the actual bug.

The shortlist

1. Publish the output, not the app — Comma

If the reader only reads, cut the runtime out. Render the figures to a self-contained HTML file and publish that:

import os, requests

html = open("dist/weekly.html").read()   # e.g. from plotly, kaleido or nbconvert
requests.post(
    "https://commareports.com/api/v1/reports",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['COMMA_API_TOKEN']}"},
    json={"title": "Weekly metrics", "html": html, "visibility": "team"},
)

The result opens instantly, forever, with no cold start and no container. Plotly, Altair, Bokeh and Vega-Lite stay interactive — the report renders in a sandboxed iframe with scripts enabled. Visibility is per report (private / team / email domain / registered / link), readers leave comment threads anchored to a specific chart, and a routine can re-publish it every Monday at the same URL with the old revisions still diffable.

Not for: anything where the reader genuinely changes inputs and expects Python to re-run. Keep the app for that.

Pricing: Free — unlimited reports, viewers, commenters and revisions.

Share a Streamlit app's output →

2. Self-host the container behind your SSO

streamlit run in a container on Cloud Run, ECS, Fly or a VM, with your identity proxy in front. Full control, always-on if you pay for it, and now it is a service you operate.

3. Hugging Face Spaces — the closest free peer

Same shape — repo in, app out — with private Spaces available and a different hardware/sleep story. Good if you want to stay on a managed free tier. See Hugging Face Spaces alternatives.

4. A BI tool — if this is really a dashboard

If what everyone wants is a filterable metrics view over a warehouse, a Streamlit app is a hand-built version of a product that exists. See Hex alternatives and Mode alternatives.

At a glance

Option	Cold start	Private	Interactive inputs	Comments
Comma (rendered)	None	Yes	Charts only	Yes
Community Cloud	Yes	Limited	Yes	No
Self-hosted container	Depends	Yes	Yes	No
HF Spaces	Yes	Private tier	Yes	No
BI platform	None	Yes	Yes	Varies

Checked September 2026. Verify current plans before committing.

How to choose

A public demo of a model or a tool? Community Cloud, still.
Users genuinely drive the inputs, on internal data? Self-host it.
They read it and reply to it? It is a report. Publish the render and skip the runtime.