11 hours ago by the_duke
Free is great, and you can get a decent mileage out of cobbling together a few services.
But I'd personally be way too stressed and annoyed by worrying about the often very restrictive free tier limits. You can very easily blow through the network egress, for example.
For things I want to be cheap I've started hosting a lot of things on Hetzner Cloud [1].
Even their cheapest instance (1vCPU/2GB RAM/20TB traffic) at 2.5 Euro/month can run a k3s Kubernetes cluster with Traefik ingress, loki logging, their own CSI driver, cert-manager, Grafana and a 2 or 3 light weight Go/Rust services. With their Terraform provider I can easily scale up the cluster in less than a minute.
And since it's Kubernetes I can also always move things to GC or AWS if required.
That's incredibly cheap, and you don't have to worry about limits or free tier periods ending, etc. It's a long-term solution.
I'm sure there are some other similar providers out there.
edit: to be clear, I also have clients with sizable production workloads on the same infrastructure, it's not just for tiny toy deployments. Above is just an example how far you can go for almost no money.
8 hours ago by BiteCode_dev
I didn't know Hetzner Cloud, an first thought, "wow, it's even cheaper than OVH, which is already a bargain" (https://www.ovhcloud.com/fr/vps/).
But then I realized you are limited in bandwithd to 20 TB, while OVH provides, for barely more €, unmetered traffic. It's huge because you never have to worry about a random spike day, a bot doing something stupid, an attack, or a use case switch (ex: video streaming).
5 hours ago by q3k
OVH might give you 'unmetered' traffic, but their connectivity _sucks_. Hetzner's 20TB/mo is equivalent to a constant measly ~60Mbps, but at least you'll reliably get this rate to most of the Internet, and very often will be able to saturate your link speed for peak usage.
There have been times where I wasn't able to get more than a handful Mbps from an OVH box in RBX to any network I've tried (multiple eyeball networks, Google Cloud, AS204880...). I also know multiple people who had to quickly migrate out of OVH because they suddenly got DSL-tier performance to their critical customers, and there was nothing they could do about it.
So it might be theoretically unmetered, but technically... I'd be surprised if you'd be reliably able to push more than 20TB in a month to outside OVH's AS, or even datacenter. You get what you pay for, and while network connectivity is not nearly as expensive as what large cloud providers would like you to believe, it's not free.
A true unmetered, non-oversubscribed, globally reaching Gbps link would run you something close to $200/mo in T1 transit commitment costs alone, and that's if you buy in bulk and already have good settlement-free peering with large networks to supplement that T1 transit.
3 hours ago by gruez
>But then I realized you are limited in bandwithd to 20 TB
How are you using 20TB/month? Are you running a tor relay or something?
10 hours ago by hardwaresofton
You think cloud is good wait till you use the dedicated servers :). I was sold on Hetzner after running into their robot marketplace (on HN I think) years ago. Fantastic provider if you can live with a little bit of latency depending on where you are.
With what Hetzner prices at I'm always on the look out for a US competitor but there doesn't seem to be one yet -- best prices consistently come from OVH most of the time or LeaseWeb.
7 hours ago by mhd
That's quite early to go Kubernetes cluster. (I'm reminded of the old "does it run Beowulf" meme)
4 hours ago by dfox
That depends. Nowadyas installing k8s is easy enough that it is probably the most strightforward way of getting automated deployments that is reasonably reliable. The only issue is that the control plane is somewhat heavy weight, which can be issue for these small cheap VM instances (and I suspect that the reason why they are cheap is that they are intentionally sized such as not to make sense for production k8s deployment).
3 hours ago by mhd
I think it boils down to what people deem "reasonably reliable" for such starting situations or whether that's a requirement in the first place. Related to whether it's better/required to structure your software as set of services or a monolith.
Of course, if you're already doing a devops or particularly mean full stack regular job where this is your daily bread, you might as well use the knowledge.
11 hours ago by bogle
That's a lot of moving parts. To give me an idea of what's left over, how lightweight are we talking when you say, "2 or 3 light weight Go services"?
10 hours ago by the_duke
Sure, and that's only recommended if you know your way around Kubernetes. I just wanted to illustrate that it's possible to host a k8s cluster with some workloads for 2.5€ per month.
You can always skip the Kubernetes overhead and use plain VMs.
Obviously you can't expect too much from a single vCPU at that price, but as an example, I had the above setup plus miniflux (feed reader), Postgres, Maddy (mail server) and Nginx for a few static sites, all on the cheapest instance. It was mostly fine, apart from occasioal stutters.
7 hours ago by papito
The amount of time and the opportunity cost involved in "knowing your way around Kubernetes", might as well just pay for Slack.
7 hours ago by bongobingo
Good for hobby or personal projects, but not if you’re building something for work. Many of these “free” tiers are designed to vendor lock you before they walk you off a pricing cliff.
Take Auth0. Free for up to 7,000 user but then it jumps to about $250/month. Migrating from Auth0 is a pain. You should really only consider these “free” services if you think you’ll always be in the free tier, and if you’d use the service even if it wasn’t free.
4 hours ago by j45
The time it takes to integrate ( and switch) many of these services may not be much less than spinning up something comparable yourself between docker, k8, lxc containers, etc.
Prematurely building scaling into every single layer of a test project might be a bit much, especially when it might not be known where the bottlenecks may occur.
In many cases, early prototypes/mvps should be semi throwaway anyways.
The idea of having a turnkey stack like this, maybe even with a script remains intriguing tho :)
5 hours ago by PinkPigeon
Our project started on a free Heroku tier (which funnily enough, to this day, is the reason our DB is postgres), but quickly outgrew that and I heard horror stories about how quickly it got expensive.
We then switched to the cheapest Hetzner tier, which was just astoundingly cheap and performed very well for two years or so.
Eventually we had to upgrade and are now paying EUR 5 for an instance that's probably beefier than we need.
All of this is backed by Dokku (haven't found a use case for k8s yet, single-machine is good enough for now).
Be interesting to see what happens if we ever wanted to scale horizontally, but there's quite a few Hetzner instances we can scale to vertically, before needing to go horizontal I think.
We also used some other 'free' services, like Netlify for hosting the static sites our product spits out, but we found that they have a lot of hidden (and surprisingly expensive) costs, like form handling. Those costs add up quickly.
Ended up going with Cloudflare for that, which delivers a lot on their free tier (and less worrying about getting DDosed by something like HN).
9 hours ago by wexq
It's missing Oracle Cloud's free tier.
Now, I don't like Oracle, their goings about with Java or their database (fortunately currently I don't have to maintain any of those), but their always free tier is solid, and I'd rank it as the best among free offerings.
I made an issue for it's inclusion, but for those who want a decent free cloud service, do check it out https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
You get 2 VMs with 1GB RAM, 2 Block Volumes for 100GB total, 10GB Object Storage, 10GB Archive Storage, 2 Virtual Oracle Databases (20GB) , Load balancer, 10TB outbound traffic/month and 10TB outbound bandwidth
8 hours ago by saurik
FWIW, I feel like hating Oracle is a perfect reason to use as much of their free service offerings as you possibly can... bleed them dry! ;P
3 hours ago by tyingq
I guess you could create and share a "continuous cartesian join" image in whatever their equivalent of an AMI is.
5 hours ago by easton
Give them a fake phone number though (if possible, I can't remember if they require SMS auth), they called me for like two weeks asking for me to spend money until I explained I was in college and I wasn't going to spend money.
3 hours ago by jeroenhd
Should've read this earlier. Hopefully they keep their sales pitch to a minimum in my country...
2 hours ago by wexq
FWIW, I've not had any spam whatsoever from them.
6 hours ago by popotamonga
Seconded, i run some basic etl jobs there on a cron. VM 100% uptime for 1 yr so far. Also the S3-compatible 10GB block storage is just awesome.
11 hours ago by voiper1
Similar list: https://free-for.dev/ with previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26239711
10 hours ago by 255kb
Hi, I'm the creator of this repo :) Thank you for sharing it on HN! I am glad you people find it useful. Feel free to contribute if there is anything that needs to be updated, I will do my best to review and merge today.
And also, thanks to all the contributors who helped creating this awesome list.
11 hours ago by wlk
For anyone looking for really straightforward way to get cloud hosting credits, checkout out IBM cloud: https://developer.ibm.com/startups/ you can get a $1000/month credit for one year no commitment to continue using them after.
10 hours ago by spamalot159
$1000/month is actually really impressive. I have seen a couple of others that offer some free credit but not nearly as much. For example Azure only gives $200 for your first 30 days https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/search
The real question is: is using IBM cloud worth it? I haven't had any experience but I might be willing to try if they are just handing out money like that.
6 hours ago by kryptk
Was spending $20k/mo with IBM at the peak in 2019, have since migrated to AWS and left IBM completely.
Thoughts:
- Support, including paid enterprise support, was hilariously bad. It would take 3 days of escalations to the account manager to get even get someone to look at a ticket, weeks to resolve anything.
- Billing is a broken mess. There is no common uuid between the billing and storage systems. It's literally not possible to link a billing line to a storage resource. Nobody at IBM I discussed this with felt it was a problem, but my stack dynamically provisions disks so this was actually a huge issue for me.
- Managed IoT services would change under us with no notice, new quotas kicking in that took us completely offline. Nobody bothered to reach out before flipping the quotas on.
I could continue but I think you get the picture.. dont take their $1k/mo poison pill, you dont want to go prod with these incapable morons.
5 hours ago by qorrect
> Support, including paid enterprise support, was hilariously bad. It would take 3 days of escalations to the account manager to get even get someone to look at a ticket, weeks to resolve anything.
Having just finished a job that used an IBM tool ( IBM Sterling File Gateway ) , I want to throw in that I'll _never_ pay for an IBM product again, their support was awful , I think they actually helped the situation once out of the 30 times we called them.
6 hours ago by wlk
You have to apply for the free credits, by filling out simple form, so there might be cases where you don't qualify.
Among the people who applied I don't know of anyone who was rejected.
10 hours ago by bufferoverflow
One year goes fast. I'd hate knowing I have to move a year from now.
10 hours ago by alephu5
Have an open mind, maybe you wouldn't want to move.
5 hours ago by giglamesh
For some of us, it is simply a question of budget. I'm using these tiers to run static sites for non-profits with no money and no plans to raise any.
2 hours ago by novaleaf
I'm a bit tired of submitting to these lists-as-git...
If you are interested in web scraping, you can use my SaaS free: https://PhantomJsCloud.com I've had the same free tier since 2017.
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