I would hope that Linode doesn't do anything price-wise otherwise it is entering into race the bottom (I'm a L customer, don't care as much what SH do). For me

I would hope that Linode doesn't do anything price-wise otherwise it is entering into race the bottom (I'm a L customer, don't care as much what SH do). For me, the AWS free account is to more about letting developers play around with the unique features(/challenges) of AWS before needing to actually deploy a real product. There are a lot of unique things to consider with AWS that you don't have to deal with on regular VPSs. This isn't about creating a free tier of hosting, and if Linode did offer something like this I'd be concerned about the potential impact on the hypervisor machine load and additional support impact.