[HN Gopher] Stack on a Budget - A collection of services with fr...
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Stack on a Budget - A collection of services with free tiers
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 332 points
Date : 2021-05-03 06:01 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| PinkPigeon wrote:
| 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).
| boobo94 wrote:
| This is nice. Thanks for sharing!
| coder1001 wrote:
| Rules for contributing to the list:
| https://github.com/255kb/stack-on-a-budget/blob/master/CONTR...
| voiper1 wrote:
| Similar list: https://free-for.dev/ with previous HN discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26239711
| sakisv wrote:
| Very nice, thanks for sharing!
|
| Speaking of free services, one thing I've been looking for with
| not much luck is a Google groups equivalent. It can be paid as
| well, just not hosted by Google because I don't trust them to not
| discontinue it in the (not so distant) future.
| wlk wrote:
| 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.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| One year goes fast. I'd hate knowing I have to move a year from
| now.
| alephu5 wrote:
| Have an open mind, maybe you wouldn't want to move.
| giglamesh wrote:
| 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.
| spamalot159 wrote:
| $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.
| wlk wrote:
| 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.
| kryptk wrote:
| 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.
| qorrect wrote:
| > 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.
| stygiansonic wrote:
| Grafana Cloud, which provides Loki logging and all the Grafana
| goodness. It has a free tier:
| https://grafana.com/products/cloud/pricing/
|
| (Not associated with Grafana, but have used this free tier for
| personal projects and to learn Grafana/ Loki)
| [deleted]
| the_duke wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
| darumderum wrote:
| +1 for hetzner
| trinovantes wrote:
| How's the latency from NA to their German datacenters? Their
| offerings seem much better than my current Digital Ocean setup
| at the $10 bracket
|
| (as a side note, is there an NA-equivalent of Hetzner?)
| krageon wrote:
| Generally latency the other way is 100-120ms if both sides
| are close to an exchange. If you live way out in the boonies
| those numbers to straight out the window.
| bogle wrote:
| 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"?
| the_duke wrote:
| 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 2.5EUR 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.
| papito wrote:
| The amount of time and the opportunity cost involved in
| "knowing your way around Kubernetes", might as well just
| pay for Slack.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Hetzner's dedicated server offerings are great. But their cloud
| offering seems rather limited.
|
| For that I'd rather look into scaleway (starting at 15
| EUR/month for DEV1-M), who offer services like managed
| kubernetes or S3 compatible object storage. What I like about
| their pricing is that it's very predictable. For example
| traffic is free (but bandwidth is limited) and object storage
| is only billed by size, not by API calls.
|
| (disclaimer: I didn't use scaleway yet, so I don't know if it
| works reliably in practice)
| jean-malo wrote:
| Hetzner is great! I have a k3s cluster running there and can't
| complain, my experience has been very smooth.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| 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.
| yunohn wrote:
| Do you have an estimate of how much traffic/load this can
| serve? Your description doesn't make it sound like these are
| for public services.
| zuzun wrote:
| Yesterday there was a blog post by someone receiving HN
| traffic on a cheap Hetzner instance:
|
| https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/how-much-traffic-comes-
| from...
| yunohn wrote:
| Thanks for this, it answers my question partially - the
| author talks about Hugo-based static sites. As for OP, I'd
| be curious to know how services with more dynamic workloads
| fare. However, reading another comment of theirs, it
| confirms my suspicion that it was for their personal
| services, not public.
| the_duke wrote:
| I edited my I initial comment to mention this, but I also
| know companies with sizeable production deployments.
|
| It's definitely viable for businesses if you need to save
| money.
|
| Although I primarily recommend it for secondary
| workloads.
|
| As a business you will probably be better off having
| S3/GCS and managed Kubernetes, managed databases etc.
| Better guarantees and less risk. And everyone is familiar
| with the big clouds, so less training for new hires.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| In terms of usability (their UI/UX, integration with Terraform,
| etc.), features and support, would you recommend Hetzner Cloud
| over Digital Ocean? I'm really interested, but, for instance, I
| don't see Hetzner offers VPCs, right?
| the_duke wrote:
| The UI is very responsive and well done. The TF provider has
| been excellent and bug free, in my experience.
|
| DO has a few features that Hetzner lacks: S3 equivalent,
| managed Kubernetes and managed databases. So you need to have
| enough tolerance for managing all of that yourself. (they do
| have storage volumes, so you can get there with self hosted
| Minio etc, but it's obviously more work)
|
| Support is pretty good, but quite a bit more responsive if
| you have larger deployments.
| e_proxus wrote:
| I tried to use DO Spaces (their S3 equivalent) to store 13
| Kb of Pulumi state data, it took 5 minutes to save.
| Switched to AWS S3, it took less than a second.
|
| It seems to be seriously rate limited to the point of being
| unusable.
| [deleted]
| j45 wrote:
| I would be weary of DigitalOcean.
|
| DigitalOcean unlike other providers does not allow you to
| easily download your disk images or backups of your own
| servers.
|
| It has been a feature requested many times and support simply
| lets you (eventually) know that it's not going to happen.
|
| That means you cannot have backups stored in more than one
| location, and more regularly, it's a veiled form of lock in
| to make it unable for you to move.
|
| Other vendors simply let you download your disk image,
| snapshot or backup at anytime.
|
| DO has a good interface, but so do others. Proxmox or ESXi
| can be run pretty easily on a piece of equipment too.
|
| OVH and Hetzner are strong options, and I have heard good
| experiences with Linode, who's pricing is on part with DO.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Can't you just:
|
| 1. mount /mnt/archive <block_storage>
|
| 2. dd if=/dev/<your_sda_partition>
| of=/mnt/archive/<my_image> bs=64K conv=noerror,sync
|
| 3. Download your image from your block.
|
| ?
| mhd wrote:
| That's quite early to go Kubernetes cluster. (I'm reminded of
| the old "does it run Beowulf" meme)
| dfox wrote:
| 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).
| watermelon0 wrote:
| Installation is easy, but maintenance/upkeep is non-
| trivial. Kubernetes ecosystem is complex by itself, without
| having to run non-managed control plane.
|
| They have K8s cloud controller manager to manage load
| balancers and private networking, and driver for attaching
| persistent volumes. Also, instances go up to 32 vCPU/128 GB
| of memory, so they are more than enough to run most loads,
| including the control plane.
| mhd wrote:
| 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.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| 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 EUR, 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).
| q3k wrote:
| 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.
| gruez wrote:
| >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?
| rollcat wrote:
| Video.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Streaming, webrtc, chat, file storage and upload,
| torrenting, file conversion, proxying, web crawling,
| backups, sync...
|
| There is more to the web than crud.
| tdeck wrote:
| See also: https://free-for.dev
| 256DEV wrote:
| This is a great resource, my currency API [1] has actually been
| on this list for a while!
|
| One thing that amazes me though is some of the places people rely
| on free services. As someone who has run a free and open access
| API for over 10 years now it never ceases to amaze me how people
| integrate free services into critical production code and high
| volume, high availability contexts.
|
| Sometimes I can see from my logs and sometimes because users end
| up contacting me - developers happily include the version of my
| API that doesn't require any API key [2] in large corporate ERPs,
| apps in the Atlassian app store, shopping carts of super high
| volume e-commerce stores etc. etc.
|
| Obviously I take great care in how my free APIs are provisioned
| and monitored, but it is still shocking to me that people just
| pick an API off a list and then rely on it in a system that
| probably cost millions in developer salaries to build...
|
| [1] https://www.exchangerate-api.com [2]
| https://www.exchangerate-api.com/docs/free
| bongobingo wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| 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 :)
| IceWreck wrote:
| There is also PythonAnywhere which isnt mentioned here
| roncohen wrote:
| I was delighted to see Opbeat on there (under Application
| Performance Monitoring).
|
| Opbeat was acquired by Elastic, Inc and turned into their APM
| product. You can try the Elastic APM product for free as well:
| https://www.elastic.co/apm
|
| (I was an Opbeat co-founder and part of the team that built
| Elastic APM)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I hate people who spend $10,000 of time to save 10 cents. Is
| anybody collecting a list of people interested in these things so
| I can send their resume to my competitor?
| KronisLV wrote:
| Some people don't even earn $10,000 per year, so that's
| probably an exaggeration. I agree that it'd be unreasonable to
| spend a year or even months looking for ways to save money, but
| if it's a few simple choices that you can make while
| researching what to use, it would probably be worth it!
| Besides, if you intend to keep a project alive, it makes sense
| to minimize the expenses that it'll passively incur.
|
| The choice between using SaaS platforms (any of the managed DB
| services, Auth0 etc.), PaaS platforms (like Heroku), the big
| IaaS vendors (AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba) and just hosting most
| of those yourself in something like Docker containers on cheap
| VPSes (think Hetzner, OVH, Contabo or Time4VPS) can result in
| an order of magnitude less or more expenditures.
| gigatexal wrote:
| What's really nice about this repo is that it has pros/cons and
| specs for each service. It's actually a really nice way to learn
| how one might use a service. I thought this was a nice side-
| effect.
| 255kb wrote:
| That was my goal when I created it. I wanted it to be an
| explanation on how and why a service is good or ready for free
| prod usage :)
| novaleaf wrote:
| 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.
| wexq wrote:
| 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
| easton wrote:
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Should've read this earlier. Hopefully they keep their sales
| pitch to a minimum in my country...
| wexq wrote:
| FWIW, I've not had any spam whatsoever from them.
| saurik wrote:
| 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
| tyingq wrote:
| I guess you could create and share a "continuous cartesian
| join" image in whatever their equivalent of an AMI is.
| popotamonga wrote:
| 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.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| I wanted to use Geojango and Postgis, the framework for GIS apps.
| I chose Cloud Run, since it allows me to install system packages
| in container, can scale down to zero, can scale up to meet
| demand. But I had to mess with Docker etc. I wonder if a much
| simpler PHP stack can absorb 5-10 RPS without an autoscaling
| containerized setup, be cheaper than a VPS and can still interact
| with Postgis in a concise way as Geodjango. I wonder if I'm
| pragmatic or wasting massive effort.
| brudgers wrote:
| In terms of business use (not personal use), if free is
| appealing, your business is under-capitalized. Building a
| business is about building relationships. Not just customer
| relationships, but business to business relationships. Customer
| retention is important and so is vendor retention. Customer churn
| is a drag on operations, so is vendor churn.
|
| The cost of a vendor is mostly the time and energy that is put
| into building your operations on top of their platform. It is
| also cash of course. But free means that your vendor will have
| trouble staying in business. That is not what you want.
| seg_lol wrote:
| Free is a huge liability, there is no contract, implicit or
| explicit. Free can go away, either by having the service
| disappear or being priced out of reach.
|
| Having TF scripts that can provision dev environments quickly
| and reliably is a more mature engineering approach than
| stitching together a bunch of free tier services.
|
| If one literally has no money and the free tier means the
| difference between doing a thing and not doing a thing, by all
| means, embrace the free tier. Otherwise it is a liability, esp
| if it is easy to exceed the limits of the free tier and having
| to handle uncontrolled charges.
| uncomputation wrote:
| I really wish we had a more robust solution to the "free vs paid"
| problem where you can trust the free solutions don't do anything
| nefarious or shady. Maybe this is already the ideal model and
| there's always going to be some downsides, but I long for the
| days when some filecoin-esque or subsidy option is available.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| One more: AWS Graviton t4g.micro vm instances using the 64-bit
| ARM Neoverse N1 cores are free until Jun 30 ;)
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| So cool! What else good is missing? Maybe customer service like
| chat (Drift etc) or CRM (free tiers)?
| simfree wrote:
| Erxes.io does both :P
| 255kb wrote:
| 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.
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