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Ask HN: What are your go-to free services to use for at-home projects?
I want to find out the most used and useful resources and services are for simple, at-home projects.
For example, say I was to build a web scraper; I could use Google Sheets as storage, Telegram’s API to send notifications, and could deploy on a Raspberry Pi (not free, but cheap and a one time expense).
What free or cheap services do you find invaluable for such projects?
- rbanffy 6y agoI used Google's classic App Engine a lot. The free tier goes a very long way.
- schwartzworld 6y agonetlify for hosting static assets
- patatino 6y agoNetlify, heroku, and firebase have some great free services. I use heroku mostly. What I like is I can create stuff that will not lock me in (other than firebase for example). My go to stack on heroku on hobby projects: Frontend React, Backend node js, database postgres. I can have all of that for free, even logging with papertrail. I can also move that stack from heroku if I would ever need that.
- thorin 6y agoCan you expand a bit on what you use Netlify for and how you do your dev for free and any limits. I've been doing some experimentation with AWS and Azure and don't really want to give my credit card up or have the risk that I will be overcharged. Also the idea of not being locked in to a particular cloud is attractive. Thanks
- patatino 6y agoOf course, the free versions have limits. Nobody is going to offer you everything for free. I like when I can implement a standard stack that I could move to my own servers any day if necessary. I only use Netlify for static websites, some deployed with git, some manually by drag and drop. The other stuff is on heroku like I wrote.
- jetti 6y agoWhat makes you choose Heroku over a micro instance of elastic beanstalk at AWS?
- patatino 6y agoI didn't compare it AWS, might be even better, I don't know
- aristofun 6y agoCan you just “git push” to aws and make it running?
- jetti 6y agoAWS has their own command line application that you can use to deploy to their services. I haven’t used that directly as we use kubernetes so our deploy is a bit more complex
- trinovantes 6y agoI once built a web scraper with GitHub actions and just used gh-pages branch as my datastore I eventually moved the service to a $5 vps + crontab because I wanted to manually set the cache control headers when serving my scraped data (updated hourly)
- mvolfik 6y agoI build web scraper and deployed to Scrapinghub scrapy cloud (not sure what it allows for free, i have student benefits) and Cloudflare workers. Allows Cron actions, logic on the backend and static files (after you understand how wrangler works, good luck at that tho (: ) See https://github.com/mvolfik/eyp-calls https://github.com/mvolfik/eyp-calls
- mvolfik 6y ago- Heroku hosting - Cloudflare free "reverse proxy" to use https on custom domain (Heroku won't do that for free) - ImprovMX email forwarding, as for sending, you can abuse Gmail (or likely any other email service), and setup DKIM signing to remove the "via gmail.com" mark and have your emails trusted - freenom.com free domains - Heroku postgres and redis, if you run into the 10k rows limit, ElephantSQL (i don't remember the limitations there) or setup a postgres server on GCP compute engine
- tra3 6y agoGitlabs free tier has CICD for a small project, including a container registry.