I recently read a short piece about using Oracle’s always free as a VPN. What other cool projects have you run out of any cloud/hosting provider’s always free offerings? (Pour one out for Angelfire and Geocities)
Sketchviz [1] runs almost entirely in free tiers from Cloudflare and AWS:<p>- Cloudflare to avoid big bandwidth bills from AWS for the wasm-compiled graphviz that is on every page<p>- AWS Lambda's 1M free requests and 400,000 GB-seconds for expressjs (web serving) and graphviz (rendering hostable .png images)<p>- API Gateway's 1M free requests for routing HTTP -> AWS Lambda (for the app) or S3 (for hosted PNGs)<p>- S3's 20K GET requests/mo (for hosted PNGs)<p>The only one I exceed is S3, but it's dirt cheap.<p>[1]: <a href="https://sketchviz.com/new" rel="nofollow">https://sketchviz.com/new</a>
Don't know if this qualifies as cool but I built a single purpose site to list IMDb ratings of all episodes of a TV show in a grid, which runs on GitHub Pages. It doesn't use any external APIs.<p><a href="https://theshowgrid.com" rel="nofollow">https://theshowgrid.com</a><p>I built it mainly for personal use. I know IMDb ratings aren't perfect but it's a decent measure of mass opinion.
I run a paid Chrome extension (with a free tier!) that audits websites for best practices:<p><a href="https://www.checkbot.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.checkbot.io/</a><p>It uses:<p>- Netlify's free tier for the homepage + Netlify CMS (free) for content editing<p>- Firebase within the free limits for cloud functions, storage + user authentication<p>- The free tier of Crisp web chat for support<p>- The Chrome store which hosts the extension for free ($5 sign up fee)<p>- Paddle for payments. They take a % of each transaction but they don't have a sign up fee or ongoing fees.
I don’t do anything with the services but hopefully this can inspire:<p><a href="https://free-for.dev/#/" rel="nofollow">https://free-for.dev/#/</a><p><a href="https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev</a>
I run <a href="https://ranked.vote" rel="nofollow">https://ranked.vote</a> on Netlify’s free tier.<p><a href="https://notify.run" rel="nofollow">https://notify.run</a> on DynamoDB’s free tier (and originally Lambda’s, but I outgrew that and it became cheaper to use a low-end Digital Ocean box)<p><a href="https://treeverse.app" rel="nofollow">https://treeverse.app</a> uses Lambda/S3/Netlify on either free or pennies-per-month tier.
I run a free GCP micro VPS and also a free Oracle Cloud VPS. I find it useful for running very low volume web app experiments and for light coding from portable devices (good Mosh+Emacs+tmux setups possible for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices).<p>Also, I use Leanpub to write my books [1], which is free to use (and they pay good royalties). A recent hack: I used to supply free downloads for my eBooks on <a href="https://markwatson.com" rel="nofollow">https://markwatson.com</a> (which I run on a free VPS) but then realized that by setting the minimum price for my Leanpub books to $0.00, I didn't even have to do that. About 50 people download a free book for everyone who chooses to pay, so I hope Leanpub is not losing money on me (they are nice people).<p>[1] <a href="https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson" rel="nofollow">https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson</a>
My personal website[1] is hosted free on Github Pages (built with Eleventy).<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.justus.ws/" rel="nofollow">https://www.justus.ws/</a>
Since you mentioned Geocities, Neocities [1]<p>[1] - <a href="https://neocities.org/" rel="nofollow">https://neocities.org/</a>
My commercial project <i>Video Hub App</i> is nearly free: <a href="https://videohubapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://videohubapp.com/</a><p>It's a <i>Gatsby</i> website and I used to use <i>Vercel</i> with their free deployments, but because I also needed a subdomain with PHP I switched to my cheap $3/month (unlimited website) webhost to serve the static files; but I also use <i>Cloudflare</i> for their free CDN. And the app demos are hosted on GitHub through Releases. The storefront is "free" through <i>Chec.io</i> in that I only pay a small fraction of every transaction.<p>Huge thank you to Vercel for making deploying Gatsby websites so easy (I run <a href="https://yboris.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://yboris.dev/</a> and <a href="https://yboris.com/" rel="nofollow">https://yboris.com/</a> through them for free). Huge thank you to GitHub (I run <a href="https://income-inequality.info/" rel="nofollow">https://income-inequality.info/</a> through it).
In running OnlineOrNot (<a href="https://onlineornot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://onlineornot.com/</a>) which itself has a generous free tier, about 5 days of the month I rely on AWS's free tier for AWS Lambda, I managed to run on Vercel.com's free tier with Next.js until around my 8th paying customer, and my business update newsletter relies on ConvertKit's free tier.
I have a small mailing list for a few selected friends running on heroku (hosting a small website and then using the scheduler plugin to fire emails) + sendgrid free tier.<p>I also have a dynamic website using a python CMS running on free heroku which the admin uses to update the website. An heroku scheduler run a netlify job every 6 hours which download the dynamic website and publishes it as a static website.
I run <a href="https://thisstartupacquisitionannouncementdoesnotexist.ajnisbet.com" rel="nofollow">https://thisstartupacquisitionannouncementdoesnotexist.ajnis...</a> on the free tier of Google App Engine.<p>And <a href="https://www.redditreads.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.redditreads.com</a> on the free tier of Google Compute Engine.
My favorite stack is now google cloud run + DynamoDB.<p>I built a little template for myself to quickly start new projects, that is also hosted with this free tier:<p><a href="https://forever-free-cloud-app-starter.chriszhu.me/" rel="nofollow">https://forever-free-cloud-app-starter.chriszhu.me/</a>
<a href="https://algot.io" rel="nofollow">https://algot.io</a><p>I use the free tier for firebase to store real time trade data. The front-end was built using Next.js and hosted using the Vercel free tier.
<a href="http://algostrategies.io" rel="nofollow">http://algostrategies.io</a><p>A FE only solution to find trading strategies. Paying only for domain, lives in Amazon s3