[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What cool stuff do you run free-tier?
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Ask HN: What cool stuff do you run free-tier?
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)
Author : coopreme
Score : 59 points
Date : 2021-09-25 12:47 UTC (10 hours ago)
| luke2m wrote:
| I run my matrix homeserver and ssh proxy for stuff hosted at home
| on Oracle free. They also offer ARM vms now.
| paulgb wrote:
| I run https://ranked.vote on Netlify's free tier.
|
| https://notify.run 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)
|
| https://treeverse.app uses Lambda/S3/Netlify on either free or
| pennies-per-month tier.
| r614 wrote:
| I like vercel a lot, does the same thing as Netlify. Also using
| Supabase and Feta for some other projects!
|
| r614.dev
| thescribbblr wrote:
| Feta?
| seanwilson wrote:
| I run a paid Chrome extension (with a free tier!) that audits
| websites for best practices:
|
| https://www.checkbot.io/
|
| It uses:
|
| - Netlify's free tier for the homepage + Netlify CMS (free) for
| content editing
|
| - Firebase within the free limits for cloud functions, storage +
| user authentication
|
| - The free tier of Crisp web chat for support
|
| - The Chrome store which hosts the extension for free ($5 sign up
| fee)
|
| - Paddle for payments. They take a % of each transaction but they
| don't have a sign up fee or ongoing fees.
| kiiko wrote:
| Just downloaded and I'm seriously impressed! Thanks for
| maintaining the extension, can see myself using it for years to
| come.
| maxwelldone wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://theshowgrid.com
|
| I built it mainly for personal use. I know IMDb ratings aren't
| perfect but it's a decent measure of mass opinion.
| Tarsul wrote:
| wow, this site is great. Thank you. Bookmarked! (simpsons
| season 2-9 really was the best, but until season 15 it was
| still "ok i guess")
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Since you mentioned Geocities, Neocities [1]
|
| [1] - https://neocities.org/
| marstall wrote:
| a customizable feed of indie label new releases:
| https://dill.vercel.app
| justusthane wrote:
| My personal website[1] is hosted free on Github Pages (built with
| Eleventy).
|
| [1]: https://www.justus.ws/
| amagasaki wrote:
| The MetaMask Chrome extension doesn't let me visit your site
| because it seems to be listed on a list concerning "Ethereum
| Phishing Detection". Haven't seen this before, just thought to
| let you know.
| justusthane wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up--false positive. I submitted an issue
| with MetaMask to have it removed.
| postpawl wrote:
| I use Netlify's free tier to host static sites.
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| I don't do anything with the services but hopefully this can
| inspire:
|
| https://free-for.dev/#/
|
| https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev
| [deleted]
| cldellow wrote:
| Sketchviz [1] runs almost entirely in free tiers from Cloudflare
| and AWS:
|
| - Cloudflare to avoid big bandwidth bills from AWS for the wasm-
| compiled graphviz that is on every page
|
| - AWS Lambda's 1M free requests and 400,000 GB-seconds for
| expressjs (web serving) and graphviz (rendering hostable .png
| images)
|
| - API Gateway's 1M free requests for routing HTTP -> AWS Lambda
| (for the app) or S3 (for hosted PNGs)
|
| - S3's 20K GET requests/mo (for hosted PNGs)
|
| The only one I exceed is S3, but it's dirt cheap.
|
| [1]: https://sketchviz.com/new
| zoover2020 wrote:
| Cool stuff! Inspiring :)
| watermelon0 wrote:
| Nice. I assume you are hosting PNGs for 'get embed code'
| feature?
|
| Could you instead store diagram definition in DynamoDB free
| tier, and create PNGs on the fly?
| cldellow wrote:
| Yeah, it's for get embed code.
|
| Could definitely have used Dynamo as a persistent layer, but
| the PNGs are transient - the definition is stored in a GitHub
| gist owned by the user (another free tier! :). But generating
| the PNGs is expensive, so they get cached in S3. An S3
| lifecycle rule automatically prunes PNGs older than a month,
| and they'll get regenerated from the gist if needed.
| orf wrote:
| A month seems like a long time, I'd have assumed you could
| probably delete 95% of the images within 3 days. Out of
| interest is the month long expire rule a guesstimate or
| something based on actual numbers?
| coopreme wrote:
| Bravo. Very cool leveraging services this way, I like your idea
| of architecting to optimize free tier svcs.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| 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).
|
| 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 https://markwatson.com (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).
|
| [1] https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
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(page generated 2021-09-25 23:02 UTC)