Stack on a Budget – A collection of services with free tiers
Free is great, and you can get a decent mileage out of cobbling together a few services.<p>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.<p>For things I want to be cheap I've started hosting a lot of things on Hetzner Cloud [1].<p>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.<p>And since it's Kubernetes I can also always move things to GC or AWS if required.<p>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.<p>I'm sure there are some other similar providers out there.<p>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 <i>almost</i> no money.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.hetzner.com/cloud" rel="nofollow">https://www.hetzner.com/cloud</a>