20 ms·

Free for Developers

967 points by fs111 6y ago

tyingq 6y ago
It would be neat if HN could offer something like "Login By Facebook" that returned user/create date/karma. Would make a nice testbed for offering free stuff while having some high pass filter like "HN account > 3 months old and has > 500 karma."
- mbernstein 6y ago
  What about those of us with 10 year old accounts and <500 karma since we're quiet? :).
  - vanous 6y ago
    Exactly this. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to write a comment, quite exceptionally
  - pselbert 6y ago
    Couldn't help but think of: Brian Called Brian: You don't need to follow me! You don't need to follow anybody! You got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals! You're all different! Man: I'm not...
  - ldd 6y ago
    yes, I'd personally say that a more interesting group is the subset of people with 10 year old accounts and karma between 50 and 500 points :D
    - PebblesRox 6y ago
      AMA:)
    - Malcx 6y ago
      There are plenty of us, not sure why we'd be an interesting group though?
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    Those should definitely also count. Yours, however, is only 9 years and 4 months old, so no free stuff for you!
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- captn3m0 6y ago
  The most common hack for this has been verification using “about” field. A website asks for your HN username, validated the age, gives you a random string to add to your HN about page. Once done, your accounts are now linked!
  - jefftk 6y ago
    And, positively or negatively, it offers a form of promotion for the website.
    - captn3m0 6y ago
      Not necessarily, if the token is just a random HMAC for eg.
- cocoa19 6y ago
  I disagree. I rather have people post honest, thoughftul opinions rather than pander to a crowd with low quality feel good posts to get freebies.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    It would be harder to gamify account age.
  - sergiotapia 6y ago
    This is why I sometimes enjoy browsing a certain technology forum that shall not be named. It's all anonymous and you can bet that people will at least be honest with their feedback.
- xmprt 6y ago
  Sounds like this could lead to another Hacktoberfest situation where people just post low effort comments and posts on hackernews just so they can get over the threshold. And some people might even make tutorials.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    Right. So it seems like if I were going to do it, it would have to be based on things that happened before any announcement. Like account age, comment/submission activity prior to announcement, etc.
- hinkley 6y ago
  How do you feel about the Stack Overflow solution to this problem? My app has 300 features. Beginners get to use 8 of them. Once ten people think you are not a wretched toad, you get to use 20. Once you've solved a problem for 200 people, you can edit other people's posts. In fact doesn't HN not let you downvote until you get 500 upvotes? It's been a while.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    It seems to work well. I am an occasional contributor so I don't have very much power there but I understand that communities collapse without this control since they get dominated by drive-by losers. I'm not one, but there's no signal I can provide that I'm not one. Metafilter has the model where you spend money as a signal that you're not one. I guess I'd pay $20 one-time as an upgrade that is revocable. I am a Wikipedia auto-confirmed user, so that lets me make articles without needing to go through the process, so that's nice. The problem with all of these sites is that they don't also police the opposite side: the obsessive guy who spends all his time on the site and attaches all of his identity to it so he is just a negative person despite having lots of 'karma'-equivalent. It's like the value-to-community vs time-spent curve is like | - | - - | - - | - - | -- - | -- - |---- --- +---------------------- | - | - | In fact, maybe HN should have a high-karma warning. "This user spends so much time on HN they can't possibly be productive in real life. You are getting the town drunk, not the star of the pub"
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      > maybe HN should have a high-karma warning My intuition is that this is less of an issue on HN than on Wikipedia.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      I need to hire you to talk to a community member I'm having trouble communicating with. Good stuff.
    - cosmodisk 6y ago
- runako 6y ago
  > "HN account > 3 months old and has > 500 karma." This is kind of gatekeepy coming from an account that's not 10 years old yet. :-P
- rubyist5eva 6y ago
  I'm the only developer out of all of my colleagues that even knows what HN even _is_.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    It's simultaneously surprising and yet also not surprising how niche HN really is.
  - laurent92 6y ago
    I’m the only one who stuck to it. I’ve given the address to all my interns along the years (and my employee), none of the interns read it. Perhaps that is why I’m the entrepreneur ;) But they make me feel like a boomer. Why gets their info through plain text?!?
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  That is a great idea, i could sell my account for a few thousand
  - abiogenesis 6y ago
    It must not be difficult to reach ~2K karma using a GPT-3 comment bot in a few days.
- soheil 6y ago
  Absolutely not, there are already people on HN pandering to the crowd just to get karma points, let's not make karma points more meaningless than they already are. This suggestion is so rich coming from someone with 34,500 karma points.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    "This suggestion is so rich coming from someone..." Meh. I made up a threshold I thought might keep abuse of a free service down for a testbed. I picked 500 since I thought that was the HN threshold for downvote ability. Sure seems to have stirred up the crowd though :)
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
    It's interesting that I've using HN for nearly 2 years,yet today was the first time I checked someone's karma. Didn't know it was a thing.
- swiley 6y ago
  Ah yes: the old "HN karma == developer" myth.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    No, just a stab at some kind of filter to offer something for free without an avalanche. It's imperfect, as any other filter would be. Perhaps account age and some activity existing before the announcement would be a better filter.
  - jtsiskin 6y ago
    It’s probably not a bad selector for “people who’s usage of my tool will lead to sales down the road”
- Jedd 6y ago
  When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.[0] Refer also the law of unintended consequences. [1] Conveniently we have a natural experiment from a year or two ago we can refer to. Stellar Lumens offered some free cryptocurrency to existing users, via Keybase accounts that leveraged external auth-equivalence (such as HN). It backfired spectacularly for all involved. [2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences [2] I think this is it - keybase.io's original blog post (referenced at [3] ) is 404'ing. https://web.archive.org/web/20191212230611/https://keybase.io/a/i/r/d/r/o/p/spacedrop2019 https://web.archive.org/web/20191212230611/https://keybase.i... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21758671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21758671
  - tyingq 6y ago
    Did the Stellar Lumens offer extend to brand new accounts? Edit: Ah, I see, people tried to find dormant HN and GitHub accounts. https://www.coindesk.com/stellar-tried-to-give-away-2b-xlm-tokens-on-keybase-then-the-spammers-came https://www.coindesk.com/stellar-tried-to-give-away-2b-xlm-t...
    - Jedd 6y ago
      Yup, I couldn't find the details, but IIRC it was a combination of people generating new accounts in the hope of catching a second round, and the fact some people had signups for Keybase auth on only one or two systems, and also IIRC even if your Keybase account pre-dated the cutoff date, you needed three associated auth systems configured in order to qualify for the coin drop. So there was a huge surge in signups for Github & Hacker News to tick that box. Doubtless some surge was related to people hoping to get in on a (speculative) second drop date.
- idlewords 6y ago
  I would be totally into OAuth-type integration with HN that I could use to lock people out of my site.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
yeldarb 6y ago
Nice resource, I submitted a PR with our free-tier offerings!
dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
It would be a nice to indicate with a small symbol next to each whether you need to give them your credit card details or not.
- BossingAround 6y ago
  This is my common issue with "free" services. It's free, but you have to input your credit card. Ah and also, if your website blows up, such as from being top 10 on HNews, you'll have to pay, but don't worry about that now.
  - ttt0 6y ago
    I have a Google account for like 14 years or so, although I no longer use it for anything other than YouTube. Yesterday I tried to watch some age restricted video on YouTube and they've suddenly asked me to confirm my age by either giving them my credit card details or a scan of my ID. Nothing that mpv with youtube-dl couldn't solve, but still.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
      > asked me to confirm my age by either giving them my credit card details or a scan of my ID. These people have no shame. Frankly, I wonder how far they will go.
      - noisem4ker 6y ago
        You mean politicians? Governments play a role in mandating age verification. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10070779#zippy=%2Cif-youre-in-the-european-union-eu-european-economic-area-eea-switzerland-or-united-kingdom https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10070779#zippy=%2C...
        ttt0 6y ago
        So on one hand you have GDPR to protect your privacy and on the other they made it so you have to give up your entire identity to them anyways. Brilliant. But let's also not forget that Google is (was?) parsing your banking info from your emails with transactions and purchases, and there wasn't even any option to turn it off.
fmajid 6y ago
The first hit is always "free". As in "free puppy", not "free beer".
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  I love your “free as in free puppy” line. I will have to use it myself in the future.
  - eitland 6y ago
    Just remember that the expensive puppy isn't house trained either when you get it, and it will need just as much attention and eat just as much food as the free puppy. I'm saying this as someone who knows way too much about Oracle databases ;-) Choose a "puppy" you can love. Get it from someone you trust and get one that's right for your situation.
    - fmajid 6y ago
      “Free chlamydia” is a better simile for Oracle.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Yes. Let the ~hatred~ puppy spread through you. Feel the power!
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  There's also free-as-in-facebook, where you are the product.
- jokab 6y ago
  What's the difference? Whenever i get free beers i get to pay the next morning and id rather clean a puppy's mess than ache all over
uberswe 6y ago
I seem to be unable to visit the site, I receive an SSL error on multiple browsers. NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID Edit: from Sweden if it matters
- speedgoose 6y ago
  You can move over to Norway when the covid19 crisis is over. The website works here.
- weberer 6y ago
  Strange. Did you blacklist Let's Encrypt on your machine for some reason?
- uberswe 6y ago
  Yea, sorry about that. I forgot I had configured a local resolver for .dev domains. in /etc/resolver/dev The site works fine.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
aspaceman 6y ago
I got a kick out of this list. Especially this sublist: > (note: You must pay if you use .casa, .cf, .click, .email, .fit, .ga, .gdn, .gq, .loan, .london, .men, .ml, .pl, .rest, .ru, .tk, .top, .work TLDs due to spam) Makes me want to search my spam folder for .gq out of curiosity alone.
- vallas 6y ago
  What is wrong with these TLDs?
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    They all have very few legitimate users, and are frequently used by email spammers (typically because registrars have offered the domains at a steep discount or entirely free for the first year).
    - st1ck 6y ago
      I'm sure that at least .ru and .pl have lots of legitimate users, but likely lots of spammers too.
kencausey 6y ago
Please point it out if I've missed it, but any list like this, of information that is changeable, should really have a publicly posted date of when the information was last confirmed.
- easton 6y ago
  Commit history could be used to figure it out: https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev
  - joshspankit 6y ago
    We need more of these as wikis, or GH repos that use robots to accept PRs. Tried it and it didn’t work? PR. Found a new one and it’s not on already? PR. Also, it would be a really nice bonus if “date added” was generated from the git commit that added the resource.
    - rovr138 6y ago
      That could be bad due to spam though Specially if you auto deploy it too
      - joshspankit 6y ago
        Some repos have already successfully used the vote method and that feels like a pretty solid defence.
    - pwdisswordfish6 6y ago
      > more of these as wikis, or GH repos The people who live on GitHub are unfortunately unable to recognize any distinction.
    - bombcar 6y ago
      The coupon sites do something like this - all you need is yes/no buttons.
  - 6y ago
hargup 6y ago
Wow!! This is an amazing list. A lot of times we aren't event aware that there exists a tool which can solve your need. And Google is of no help here.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
justin_oaks 6y ago
Anyone on here make use of the free tier of any of these? While I've known of some of the free tier things on AWS, and Google Cloud, I never made use of them long term.
- tyingq 6y ago
  I like free google cloud shell. It's nice to have a place to troubleshoot things from an outside network. Yandex's email is nice for some things also, bring-your-own-domain and 10Gb, no cost.
- Swizec 6y ago
  Heavy user of free AWS Lambdas ... although I might be paying $5/mo for everything combined these days.
- CraigRood 6y ago
  I'm interested in some feedback on this point too. I'm currently looking at what Oracle has to offer as it seems to be the most straightforward, and also seems to have a simpler pricing structure compared to AWS or Azure for the small addons I may need.
- yoru-sulfur 6y ago
  I'm using Oracle clouds free tier for the 2 free (tiny) VMs. I use them to host a bunch of misc. scripts/programs I've written, a discord bot I wrote for a server I'm in with some friends, my calibre ebook library is also backed up there and the calibre content server is running so I can access it over the internet should I want something to read and be away from my computer. Mostly good experience, if not the most user friendly. The data transfer allowance on their free tier is fantastic, which is definitely the exception from most free offerings I've seen.
- jldugger 6y ago
  Yes, I've been using the free tiers of google cloud, oracle cloud, trello, github, freshworks, GA, datadog, and sentry.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
neogodless 6y ago
Does anyone know of a decent tutorial for building low-volume / prototype interactive web applications using one of the major cloud-hosting providers, wholly within the free limits? Any framework would be interesting for learning purposes. I have some older MVC .NET sites and I poked around with Azure free Windows Server VMs, but the performance is so painfully bad; if you do anything, you run out of memory. But I'm gaining proficiency in NodeJS and Python, and hoping to learn how to take advantage of free tiers for practice in development and testing. I imagine it can all be self-taught/learned, but if there exists documentation to go through the motions in the learning process, I think it would help a lot of people.
- dchess 6y ago
  Have you tried Heroku? Deploying via git is pretty handy. I've mostly moved to using Dokku on the $5 tier of DigitalOcean, but the approach is simple.
  - neogodless 6y ago
    I haven't. That looks super promising! I find AWS/Azure almost intentionally obtuse in their pricing and setup/configuration. This looks like they focus on the opposite!
    - jholman 6y ago
      In the context of AWS Free Tier, the non-obtuse option is you do the EC2 t3.micro with Linux on it, maybe also the RDS t3.micro, and you ignore all that make-things-harder-so-consultants-can-charge-more nonsense. Install your own nginx, install your own node or python or whatever, ignore all their obtuse crap. Heroku is cool, too, though.
      - timClicks 6y ago
        There's no "always free" AWS tier though, correct? You're still going to end up paying for the app after 12 months, or am I missing something?
abledon 6y ago
really impressed with Azure's new UI... its the little things like this that make me want to use it over GCP etc.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  Second this. I'm kind of cloud virgin but navigating Azure is super easy. It's very logic,while GCP is..well.. it ain't YouTube tbh..
  - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
    Youtube is the absolute worst media consumption/discovery UI in the universe. They couldn't make it more user-hostile if they tried. (Maybe being hostile is the point? TBH I don't know the real monetization strategy behind Youtube, maybe hostility pays here.)
bootify 6y ago
Crazy, noticed a traffic spike on my page from free-for.dev - and it's just one in a (very long) list. Must be a ton of traffic there now.
MightyOwl13 6y ago
My 2 cents on this - I have used the Oracle Cloud free tier trying to get the VMs running. The default resource usage seems higher than what you would get on Hetzner/ionos/digital ocean and the resource monitors are a good chunk of that usage. Configuration was also considerably more difficult for someone with little experience such as myself... Achieving the same task (setting up a BookStackApp server) took considerably longer than it did on most services on which you pay. What I'm trying to say is that you do get what you pay for (or don't).
- valzam 6y ago
  I would argue that Oracle had more to do with that than the fact that it was free... Using the paid version would probably have been even more difficult.
  - Twirrim 6y ago
    I appreciate there's an uphill battle here to gain HN user trust. It is Oracle after all. OCI is a very different from what you've seen from Oracle in the past. It was created by ex-AWS, Azure, and GCP engineers, based on our collective experiences within those platforms. From some regards you might say we are to Oracle, what Azure was to Microsoft earlier on. A wildly different way of doing things. Using standard / paid instances should be no more difficult or hard than using free-tier ones, other than the obvious need to have converted to a non-free account and, I believe, sorted out payment methods. They launch and run the same way, just when you have a paid account you can launch on larger instances. We've got enough things we want to do with the cloud, without having to resort to building lots of separate experiences and code paths for free tier accounts. Disclaimer: opinion is entirely my own, may not reflect the opinions of my employers, etc.
    - pabs3 6y ago
      Is Oracle going to start putting their OCI API client code into distros and get distros official accounts for distributing images etc? (Debian would be my first choice for this)
rapfaria 6y ago
Would be nice if this had a newsletter for updates like "Hey, X is cutting costs and your free happy meal will be cut to 2 nuggets starting 1st of March, and end completely next June"
bulleyashah 6y ago
Is there a cloud provider that doesn't require a credit card for free tier?
- RogantisAgat 6y ago
  Pick up a (re-loadable or not) $10 VISA, Mastercard, or AMEX gift card and register it for use online. There's your free tier-use-only credit card.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- paraknight 6y ago
  I haven't come across any, but I'm not surprised since it makes them rife for abuse. There are providers that accept payment in bitcoin however, mostly seedbox providers. RapidSeedbox comes to mind.
- paulcarroty 6y ago
  https://www.ibm.com/cloud/free https://www.ibm.com/cloud/free, 30 days trial for "Hyper Protect Virtual Server" with 2GB RAM.
deathanatos 6y ago
> Azure Kubernetes Service - Managed Kubernetes service, free cluster management Since this one is the bane of my existence at the moment. Yeah, this statement is technically correct, it is technically free, but you still pay for the VMs that are part of the cluster, and their disks. (Unless they can qualify for some other "free" metric.) But we've been using this, and we've had lots of spans of time where the managed API server will just time out requests. There's no guarantee on the free version; there's an SLO, but our metrics indicate that it isn't being met. (And our support requests were met with "upgrade to a paid SLA"… which we are, b/c we're a business, but if you're looking at this list, that presumably isn't you.)
- arcticfox 6y ago
  FWIW if anyone's looking, the hosted DigitalOcean Kubernetes clusters are fantastic. Despite being very early adopters, we've only had one issue and when we pointed the finger at them...the DO k8s team immediately diagnosed the issue, and it was our own fault. Woops.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    Same with Scaleway's, both just work and are fully free. Some time ago i compared them against the competition and they fared very well even against GKE: https://atodorov.me/2020/06/14/comparing-kubernetes-managed-services-across-digital-ocean-scaleway-ovhcloud-and-linode/ https://atodorov.me/2020/06/14/comparing-kubernetes-managed-...
    - GordonS 6y ago
      Just want to says thanks for such an in-depth comparison!
    - deathanatos 6y ago
      I'm curious; do these host the control plane bits inside the cluster (on the VMs in the cluster, which I presume are not free)? In AKS, the API server & its backing storage, as well as most of the core controllers are "managed", in that they run somewhere not in your cluster. But then, you hit the issues where they must consume resources, and someone at the end of the day must pay for those. I'd almost rather they run in the cluster, since those are resources I can introspect & debug. (In a normal "vanilla" cluster, not a cloud-based one, normally these would all run inside the cluster, unless you configured them differently. E.g., kubeadm builds them into the cluster.)
Vaslo 6y ago
So question for the masses, I’ve wanted to setup a personal account on Google cloud, azure etc and take advantage of free stuff but I am terrified something will happen and I’ll mess something up or someone will mess it up for me and I’ll be out hundreds on my credit card. Any suggestions here? Great list.
- kodah 6y ago
  Meh, I hate the idea of individual devs signing up for clouds like AWS, GCP, or Azure. These are huge cost machines and are designed to serve fast moving startups and hulking enterprises. The best you can do is setup account limits and alerts. The real answer is that if you have an understanding of networks and systems, then the cloud is just a data center with different considerations. Your company should be giving you resources like sandbox accounts that you can play in. This is how you'll really learn.
- pkage 6y ago
  I strongly recommend setting up and using virtual credit cards, you can use them to enforce spending limits and spend maximums. There are several services that allow this, for example my CC company supports them directly or there are several services that let you set them up backed by a debit card. That way, if your hosting provider overcharges you it'll just bounce.
  - mycall 6y ago
    PayPal can provide virtual credit cards, if I remember correctly.
  - lemarchr 6y ago
    Bills don't just magically go away if you refuse to pay them.
    - jojobas 6y ago
      They do to a degree. Nobody's going to court over a $200 bounced charge that you could argue shouldn't have been there in the first place. Most services will just close your account and move on with their lives.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
I have a Certificate in GIS and I know a little HTML and CSS and yadda, but I don't really write any programming languages. So I don't have a good sense of where they are drawing the line here for things that fit or don't fit this list. Their section on Data Visualization on Maps lacks a link to Stamen Design free tiles, available under a creative commons license. I'm wondering if people here think it's worth submitting a pull request or if that sounds like it is outside of the scope of what they are trying to curate for some reason. https://free-for.dev/#/?id=data-visualization-on-maps https://free-for.dev/#/?id=data-visualization-on-maps https://www.reddit.com/r/CitizenPlanners/comments/ezklaq/stamen_maps_free_to_use_under_creative_commons/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CitizenPlanners/comments/ezklaq/sta...
- lucideer 6y ago
  Stamen could definitely be added as a free tile host (as should OSM themselves), but I would specify that it's the hosting service that's being offered freely, not just the tiles themselves. While the tiles are free (CC) I would say a list of freely licenced downloadable resources/assets for devs would be much bigger/broader in scope.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    Thanks. I've tried to do a little reading up on Saas, Paas and Iaas and tried to understand this a bit better. I'll try to do a pull request in the next day or two. For me, Stamen Maps have been a big deal for stuff I do. It took me forever to find something of this caliber that's suitable for my aims, but I'm just doing maps for various projects and not some kind of GIS thing.
    - lucideer 6y ago
      > I've tried to do a little reading up on Saas, Paas and Iaas and tried to understand this a bit better To distill this down for the purpose of this specific topic (map tiles): - the map tiles being provided under CC is a copyright / right-of-use / legal intellectual property thing. Nothing to do with any provision of material service by Stamen What Stamen provide that's relevant here is a service, that's somewhere vaguely in between SaaS and PaaS. - SaaS would be if Stamen provided some kind of maps website, with accounts, etc. for working with data & displaying maps. They don't really do that fully. - PaaS is a bit closer to what Stamen do: they run a server and host their own map tiles. You can point your website at their server, and they pay the hosting cost of the traffic you send there. (PaaS as a buzzword technically involves a bit more than this, but this would be a subset of it). - IaaS is an unrelated thing here: this would be like if they offered servers for you to go and host your own map tiles on, along with a load of tools for managing those servers. TL;DR: The CC-licencing of tiles is about releasing "artwork"/IP? (is there a better term for map styles??) that they've already created. Tile-hosting is about paying for internet traffic of the browsers hitting the server where those tiles live.
fomine3 6y ago
I wish this list to include term for free tier.
vmception 6y ago
for.dev is available could just register that and make the subdomain free.
ppipada 6y ago
Shout out to https://docsify.js.org/#/ https://docsify.js.org/#/ on which this site is based. Great tool to get a doc site ready in minimal time. My personal experience with this is also amazing :)
- DCoder 6y ago
  It's mildly amusing to see kudos for a solution that lacks any <noscript> support.
glaucon 6y ago
WRT Dynamodb the "25 Gb" free bit is not as useful as it might be because it's the Read and Write Units which might bite you and those are not directly related to data size but are also affected by how you've structured your data. It does mention the bit about the Units on the click through but I'm just saying you want to drill down into these things when it's more subtle than "so much disk" or "that many minutes of EC2". I'm not bagging the whole thing by any means, it looks like a really useful list but some things are a lot easier to understand what you're getting for free than others.
st1ck 6y ago
> Unixtime - Free API to convert Unixtime to DateTime and vice versa. Can anyone explain why would you want it as a service?
- gregoriol 6y ago
  It would have been perfect if on a .whynot tld
- dspillett 6y ago
  If you click the link, it documents the reason for its existence: "This WebService was built in 20 minutes using..." It is intended as a "next step after hello world" example for an unoriginally named low-code integrations platform, rather than being someone anyone thought someone might need it its own right.
Storm-Bringer 6y ago
forwardemail.net : if you are a Fastmail user does it provide you any benefit? Fastmail already has a catch-all feature.
Nazzareno 6y ago
I would add the "Editors" category including embeddable editors. For example TinyMCE as html editor, BEEPlugin for email/page editors...
jillesvangurp 6y ago
We've been on cloud run for the last six months. We run our monolith (Spring boot) as a Docker service. Cloud build for CI/CD. And Firestore as a not great but free database. We even increased the instance size (1GB, 2vcpus) to deal with memory issues & spring boot and it had no impact on our cost (we are still below the threshold). It's an awesome deal for basically 0$ bills every month (we pay for a few other things though) and great for us as we are a small startup bootstrapping at the moment. It more than handles our development and early access traffic. This 0$ setup gets us highly available docker + firestore for absolutely nothing until we hit the freemium threshold. We went over by a fraction of a dollar on a couple of occasions when we did big imports, etc. But we won't start paying until the point where we have recurring revenue and users basically causing increased traffic. I also like not having to deal with devops for this. No faffing around with doing terraform, setting up CI, writing complex deploy scripts, etc. Frees up a lot of my time. If you have done any of that in the past years, this is shockingly easy in comparison. A simple wizard, couple of clicks and you have your docker container building and deploying straight from github. I was not expecting this to work and but then it did on the first try. Switching the whole setup to using vms is super easy to do at any point since you can basically just tell it to run a docker container. It's nice to have that option. But then you need multiple vms, a load balancer, etc. and before you know it you are looking at more like 75/month. Add a decent database and it gets worse. High availability, worse still. And you need to do the devops to connect all these bits of infrastructure. You will blow more on staffing cost than hosting. Even a single day spend by a senior that can actually do this would cost you like 1000$. Lets be fair, it's never just a day. IMHO this is what most deployments should be like: bog standard docker thing, go run it and take care of all the things that aren't optional like giving me some dashboards, alerting, etc. and just pay for what you actually use.
- paws 6y ago
  > We run our monolith (Spring boot) as a Docker service Does Cloud Run's free tier 'sleep' containers when they don't get regular traffic? Several years back Heroku nerfed their free tier -- they would proactively place low traffic apps into 'sleep' mode so the next request would have a noticeable several second long delay. I ask because our SpringBoot monolith takes 30s to startup, and has bursty traffic, so I was of the expectation that Google Cloud would probably 'sleep' low traffic containers like this also. Would be nice if that were not the case.
Jyaif 6y ago
My game has been taking advantage of the GAE free tier for approximately 10 years now, only having to pay a few cents per months when there's a bump in activity. I probably could have avoided those cents by adding a little bit more caching. I highly recommend it.
treesknees 6y ago
Anyone know if there is a similar list but for university students? I know some places will give you credits or free services if you're enrolled at as a student for working on projects.
tluyben2 6y ago
Pull requests seem to be open for a while ; is this maintained actively?

967 points by fs111 6y ago

It would be neat if HN could offer something like "Login By Facebook" that returned user/create date/karma. Would make a nice testbed for offering free stuff while having some high pass filter like "HN account > 3 months old and has > 500 karma."

mbernstein 6y ago
What about those of us with 10 year old accounts and <500 karma since we're quiet? :).
- vanous 6y ago
  Exactly this. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to write a comment, quite exceptionally
- pselbert 6y ago
  Couldn't help but think of: Brian Called Brian: You don't need to follow me! You don't need to follow anybody! You got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals! You're all different! Man: I'm not...
- ldd 6y ago
  yes, I'd personally say that a more interesting group is the subset of people with 10 year old accounts and karma between 50 and 500 points :D
  - PebblesRox 6y ago
    AMA:)
  - Malcx 6y ago
    There are plenty of us, not sure why we'd be an interesting group though?
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  Those should definitely also count. Yours, however, is only 9 years and 4 months old, so no free stuff for you!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
captn3m0 6y ago
The most common hack for this has been verification using “about” field. A website asks for your HN username, validated the age, gives you a random string to add to your HN about page. Once done, your accounts are now linked!
- jefftk 6y ago
  And, positively or negatively, it offers a form of promotion for the website.
  - captn3m0 6y ago
    Not necessarily, if the token is just a random HMAC for eg.
cocoa19 6y ago
I disagree. I rather have people post honest, thoughftul opinions rather than pander to a crowd with low quality feel good posts to get freebies.
- tyingq 6y ago
  It would be harder to gamify account age.
- sergiotapia 6y ago
  This is why I sometimes enjoy browsing a certain technology forum that shall not be named. It's all anonymous and you can bet that people will at least be honest with their feedback.
xmprt 6y ago
Sounds like this could lead to another Hacktoberfest situation where people just post low effort comments and posts on hackernews just so they can get over the threshold. And some people might even make tutorials.
- tyingq 6y ago
  Right. So it seems like if I were going to do it, it would have to be based on things that happened before any announcement. Like account age, comment/submission activity prior to announcement, etc.
hinkley 6y ago
How do you feel about the Stack Overflow solution to this problem? My app has 300 features. Beginners get to use 8 of them. Once ten people think you are not a wretched toad, you get to use 20. Once you've solved a problem for 200 people, you can edit other people's posts. In fact doesn't HN not let you downvote until you get 500 upvotes? It's been a while.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  It seems to work well. I am an occasional contributor so I don't have very much power there but I understand that communities collapse without this control since they get dominated by drive-by losers. I'm not one, but there's no signal I can provide that I'm not one. Metafilter has the model where you spend money as a signal that you're not one. I guess I'd pay $20 one-time as an upgrade that is revocable. I am a Wikipedia auto-confirmed user, so that lets me make articles without needing to go through the process, so that's nice. The problem with all of these sites is that they don't also police the opposite side: the obsessive guy who spends all his time on the site and attaches all of his identity to it so he is just a negative person despite having lots of 'karma'-equivalent. It's like the value-to-community vs time-spent curve is like | - | - - | - - | - - | -- - | -- - |---- --- +---------------------- | - | - | In fact, maybe HN should have a high-karma warning. "This user spends so much time on HN they can't possibly be productive in real life. You are getting the town drunk, not the star of the pub"
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    > maybe HN should have a high-karma warning My intuition is that this is less of an issue on HN than on Wikipedia.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I need to hire you to talk to a community member I'm having trouble communicating with. Good stuff.
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
runako 6y ago
> "HN account > 3 months old and has > 500 karma." This is kind of gatekeepy coming from an account that's not 10 years old yet. :-P
rubyist5eva 6y ago
I'm the only developer out of all of my colleagues that even knows what HN even _is_.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  It's simultaneously surprising and yet also not surprising how niche HN really is.
- laurent92 6y ago
  I’m the only one who stuck to it. I’ve given the address to all my interns along the years (and my employee), none of the interns read it. Perhaps that is why I’m the entrepreneur ;) But they make me feel like a boomer. Why gets their info through plain text?!?
cblconfederate 6y ago
That is a great idea, i could sell my account for a few thousand
- abiogenesis 6y ago
  It must not be difficult to reach ~2K karma using a GPT-3 comment bot in a few days.
soheil 6y ago
Absolutely not, there are already people on HN pandering to the crowd just to get karma points, let's not make karma points more meaningless than they already are. This suggestion is so rich coming from someone with 34,500 karma points.
- tyingq 6y ago
  "This suggestion is so rich coming from someone..." Meh. I made up a threshold I thought might keep abuse of a free service down for a testbed. I picked 500 since I thought that was the HN threshold for downvote ability. Sure seems to have stirred up the crowd though :)
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  It's interesting that I've using HN for nearly 2 years,yet today was the first time I checked someone's karma. Didn't know it was a thing.
swiley 6y ago
Ah yes: the old "HN karma == developer" myth.
- tyingq 6y ago
  No, just a stab at some kind of filter to offer something for free without an avalanche. It's imperfect, as any other filter would be. Perhaps account age and some activity existing before the announcement would be a better filter.
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  It’s probably not a bad selector for “people who’s usage of my tool will lead to sales down the road”
Jedd 6y ago
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.[0] Refer also the law of unintended consequences. [1] Conveniently we have a natural experiment from a year or two ago we can refer to. Stellar Lumens offered some free cryptocurrency to existing users, via Keybase accounts that leveraged external auth-equivalence (such as HN). It backfired spectacularly for all involved. [2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences [2] I think this is it - keybase.io's original blog post (referenced at [3] ) is 404'ing. https://web.archive.org/web/20191212230611/https://keybase.io/a/i/r/d/r/o/p/spacedrop2019 https://web.archive.org/web/20191212230611/https://keybase.i... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21758671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21758671
- tyingq 6y ago
  Did the Stellar Lumens offer extend to brand new accounts? Edit: Ah, I see, people tried to find dormant HN and GitHub accounts. https://www.coindesk.com/stellar-tried-to-give-away-2b-xlm-tokens-on-keybase-then-the-spammers-came https://www.coindesk.com/stellar-tried-to-give-away-2b-xlm-t...
  - Jedd 6y ago
    Yup, I couldn't find the details, but IIRC it was a combination of people generating new accounts in the hope of catching a second round, and the fact some people had signups for Keybase auth on only one or two systems, and also IIRC even if your Keybase account pre-dated the cutoff date, you needed three associated auth systems configured in order to qualify for the coin drop. So there was a huge surge in signups for Github & Hacker News to tick that box. Doubtless some surge was related to people hoping to get in on a (speculative) second drop date.
idlewords 6y ago
I would be totally into OAuth-type integration with HN that I could use to lock people out of my site.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

yeldarb 6y ago

Nice resource, I submitted a PR with our free-tier offerings!

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago

It would be a nice to indicate with a small symbol next to each whether you need to give them your credit card details or not.

BossingAround 6y ago
This is my common issue with "free" services. It's free, but you have to input your credit card. Ah and also, if your website blows up, such as from being top 10 on HNews, you'll have to pay, but don't worry about that now.
- ttt0 6y ago
  I have a Google account for like 14 years or so, although I no longer use it for anything other than YouTube. Yesterday I tried to watch some age restricted video on YouTube and they've suddenly asked me to confirm my age by either giving them my credit card details or a scan of my ID. Nothing that mpv with youtube-dl couldn't solve, but still.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    > asked me to confirm my age by either giving them my credit card details or a scan of my ID. These people have no shame. Frankly, I wonder how far they will go.
    - noisem4ker 6y ago
      You mean politicians? Governments play a role in mandating age verification. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10070779#zippy=%2Cif-youre-in-the-european-union-eu-european-economic-area-eea-switzerland-or-united-kingdom https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10070779#zippy=%2C...
      - ttt0 6y ago
        So on one hand you have GDPR to protect your privacy and on the other they made it so you have to give up your entire identity to them anyways. Brilliant. But let's also not forget that Google is (was?) parsing your banking info from your emails with transactions and purchases, and there wasn't even any option to turn it off.

fmajid 6y ago

The first hit is always "free". As in "free puppy", not "free beer".

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
I love your “free as in free puppy” line. I will have to use it myself in the future.
- eitland 6y ago
  Just remember that the expensive puppy isn't house trained either when you get it, and it will need just as much attention and eat just as much food as the free puppy. I'm saying this as someone who knows way too much about Oracle databases ;-) Choose a "puppy" you can love. Get it from someone you trust and get one that's right for your situation.
  - fmajid 6y ago
    “Free chlamydia” is a better simile for Oracle.
hinkley 6y ago
Yes. Let the ~hatred~ puppy spread through you. Feel the power!
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
There's also free-as-in-facebook, where you are the product.
jokab 6y ago
What's the difference? Whenever i get free beers i get to pay the next morning and id rather clean a puppy's mess than ache all over

uberswe 6y ago

I seem to be unable to visit the site, I receive an SSL error on multiple browsers. NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID Edit: from Sweden if it matters

speedgoose 6y ago
You can move over to Norway when the covid19 crisis is over. The website works here.
weberer 6y ago
Strange. Did you blacklist Let's Encrypt on your machine for some reason?
uberswe 6y ago
Yea, sorry about that. I forgot I had configured a local resolver for .dev domains. in /etc/resolver/dev The site works fine.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

aspaceman 6y ago

I got a kick out of this list. Especially this sublist: > (note: You must pay if you use .casa, .cf, .click, .email, .fit, .ga, .gdn, .gq, .loan, .london, .men, .ml, .pl, .rest, .ru, .tk, .top, .work TLDs due to spam) Makes me want to search my spam folder for .gq out of curiosity alone.

vallas 6y ago
What is wrong with these TLDs?
- duskwuff 6y ago
  They all have very few legitimate users, and are frequently used by email spammers (typically because registrars have offered the domains at a steep discount or entirely free for the first year).
  - st1ck 6y ago
    I'm sure that at least .ru and .pl have lots of legitimate users, but likely lots of spammers too.

kencausey 6y ago

Please point it out if I've missed it, but any list like this, of information that is changeable, should really have a publicly posted date of when the information was last confirmed.

easton 6y ago
Commit history could be used to figure it out: https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev
- joshspankit 6y ago
  We need more of these as wikis, or GH repos that use robots to accept PRs. Tried it and it didn’t work? PR. Found a new one and it’s not on already? PR. Also, it would be a really nice bonus if “date added” was generated from the git commit that added the resource.
  - rovr138 6y ago
    That could be bad due to spam though Specially if you auto deploy it too
    - joshspankit 6y ago
      Some repos have already successfully used the vote method and that feels like a pretty solid defence.
  - pwdisswordfish6 6y ago
    > more of these as wikis, or GH repos The people who live on GitHub are unfortunately unable to recognize any distinction.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    The coupon sites do something like this - all you need is yes/no buttons.
- 6y ago

hargup 6y ago

Wow!! This is an amazing list. A lot of times we aren't event aware that there exists a tool which can solve your need. And Google is of no help here.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

justin_oaks 6y ago

Anyone on here make use of the free tier of any of these? While I've known of some of the free tier things on AWS, and Google Cloud, I never made use of them long term.

tyingq 6y ago
I like free google cloud shell. It's nice to have a place to troubleshoot things from an outside network. Yandex's email is nice for some things also, bring-your-own-domain and 10Gb, no cost.
Swizec 6y ago
Heavy user of free AWS Lambdas ... although I might be paying $5/mo for everything combined these days.
CraigRood 6y ago
I'm interested in some feedback on this point too. I'm currently looking at what Oracle has to offer as it seems to be the most straightforward, and also seems to have a simpler pricing structure compared to AWS or Azure for the small addons I may need.
yoru-sulfur 6y ago
I'm using Oracle clouds free tier for the 2 free (tiny) VMs. I use them to host a bunch of misc. scripts/programs I've written, a discord bot I wrote for a server I'm in with some friends, my calibre ebook library is also backed up there and the calibre content server is running so I can access it over the internet should I want something to read and be away from my computer. Mostly good experience, if not the most user friendly. The data transfer allowance on their free tier is fantastic, which is definitely the exception from most free offerings I've seen.
jldugger 6y ago
Yes, I've been using the free tiers of google cloud, oracle cloud, trello, github, freshworks, GA, datadog, and sentry.
isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago

neogodless 6y ago

Does anyone know of a decent tutorial for building low-volume / prototype interactive web applications using one of the major cloud-hosting providers, wholly within the free limits? Any framework would be interesting for learning purposes. I have some older MVC .NET sites and I poked around with Azure free Windows Server VMs, but the performance is so painfully bad; if you do anything, you run out of memory. But I'm gaining proficiency in NodeJS and Python, and hoping to learn how to take advantage of free tiers for practice in development and testing. I imagine it can all be self-taught/learned, but if there exists documentation to go through the motions in the learning process, I think it would help a lot of people.

dchess 6y ago
Have you tried Heroku? Deploying via git is pretty handy. I've mostly moved to using Dokku on the $5 tier of DigitalOcean, but the approach is simple.
- neogodless 6y ago
  I haven't. That looks super promising! I find AWS/Azure almost intentionally obtuse in their pricing and setup/configuration. This looks like they focus on the opposite!
  - jholman 6y ago
    In the context of AWS Free Tier, the non-obtuse option is you do the EC2 t3.micro with Linux on it, maybe also the RDS t3.micro, and you ignore all that make-things-harder-so-consultants-can-charge-more nonsense. Install your own nginx, install your own node or python or whatever, ignore all their obtuse crap. Heroku is cool, too, though.
    - timClicks 6y ago
      There's no "always free" AWS tier though, correct? You're still going to end up paying for the app after 12 months, or am I missing something?

abledon 6y ago

really impressed with Azure's new UI... its the little things like this that make me want to use it over GCP etc.

cosmodisk 6y ago
Second this. I'm kind of cloud virgin but navigating Azure is super easy. It's very logic,while GCP is..well.. it ain't YouTube tbh..
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  Youtube is the absolute worst media consumption/discovery UI in the universe. They couldn't make it more user-hostile if they tried. (Maybe being hostile is the point? TBH I don't know the real monetization strategy behind Youtube, maybe hostility pays here.)

bootify 6y ago

Crazy, noticed a traffic spike on my page from free-for.dev - and it's just one in a (very long) list. Must be a ton of traffic there now.

MightyOwl13 6y ago

My 2 cents on this - I have used the Oracle Cloud free tier trying to get the VMs running. The default resource usage seems higher than what you would get on Hetzner/ionos/digital ocean and the resource monitors are a good chunk of that usage. Configuration was also considerably more difficult for someone with little experience such as myself... Achieving the same task (setting up a BookStackApp server) took considerably longer than it did on most services on which you pay. What I'm trying to say is that you do get what you pay for (or don't).

valzam 6y ago
I would argue that Oracle had more to do with that than the fact that it was free... Using the paid version would probably have been even more difficult.
- Twirrim 6y ago
  I appreciate there's an uphill battle here to gain HN user trust. It is Oracle after all. OCI is a very different from what you've seen from Oracle in the past. It was created by ex-AWS, Azure, and GCP engineers, based on our collective experiences within those platforms. From some regards you might say we are to Oracle, what Azure was to Microsoft earlier on. A wildly different way of doing things. Using standard / paid instances should be no more difficult or hard than using free-tier ones, other than the obvious need to have converted to a non-free account and, I believe, sorted out payment methods. They launch and run the same way, just when you have a paid account you can launch on larger instances. We've got enough things we want to do with the cloud, without having to resort to building lots of separate experiences and code paths for free tier accounts. Disclaimer: opinion is entirely my own, may not reflect the opinions of my employers, etc.
  - pabs3 6y ago
    Is Oracle going to start putting their OCI API client code into distros and get distros official accounts for distributing images etc? (Debian would be my first choice for this)

rapfaria 6y ago

Would be nice if this had a newsletter for updates like "Hey, X is cutting costs and your free happy meal will be cut to 2 nuggets starting 1st of March, and end completely next June"

bulleyashah 6y ago

Is there a cloud provider that doesn't require a credit card for free tier?

RogantisAgat 6y ago
Pick up a (re-loadable or not) $10 VISA, Mastercard, or AMEX gift card and register it for use online. There's your free tier-use-only credit card.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
paraknight 6y ago
I haven't come across any, but I'm not surprised since it makes them rife for abuse. There are providers that accept payment in bitcoin however, mostly seedbox providers. RapidSeedbox comes to mind.
paulcarroty 6y ago
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/free https://www.ibm.com/cloud/free, 30 days trial for "Hyper Protect Virtual Server" with 2GB RAM.

deathanatos 6y ago

> Azure Kubernetes Service - Managed Kubernetes service, free cluster management Since this one is the bane of my existence at the moment. Yeah, this statement is technically correct, it is technically free, but you still pay for the VMs that are part of the cluster, and their disks. (Unless they can qualify for some other "free" metric.) But we've been using this, and we've had lots of spans of time where the managed API server will just time out requests. There's no guarantee on the free version; there's an SLO, but our metrics indicate that it isn't being met. (And our support requests were met with "upgrade to a paid SLA"… which we are, b/c we're a business, but if you're looking at this list, that presumably isn't you.)

arcticfox 6y ago
FWIW if anyone's looking, the hosted DigitalOcean Kubernetes clusters are fantastic. Despite being very early adopters, we've only had one issue and when we pointed the finger at them...the DO k8s team immediately diagnosed the issue, and it was our own fault. Woops.
- sofixa 6y ago
  Same with Scaleway's, both just work and are fully free. Some time ago i compared them against the competition and they fared very well even against GKE: https://atodorov.me/2020/06/14/comparing-kubernetes-managed-services-across-digital-ocean-scaleway-ovhcloud-and-linode/ https://atodorov.me/2020/06/14/comparing-kubernetes-managed-...
  - GordonS 6y ago
    Just want to says thanks for such an in-depth comparison!
  - deathanatos 6y ago
    I'm curious; do these host the control plane bits inside the cluster (on the VMs in the cluster, which I presume are not free)? In AKS, the API server & its backing storage, as well as most of the core controllers are "managed", in that they run somewhere not in your cluster. But then, you hit the issues where they must consume resources, and someone at the end of the day must pay for those. I'd almost rather they run in the cluster, since those are resources I can introspect & debug. (In a normal "vanilla" cluster, not a cloud-based one, normally these would all run inside the cluster, unless you configured them differently. E.g., kubeadm builds them into the cluster.)

Vaslo 6y ago

So question for the masses, I’ve wanted to setup a personal account on Google cloud, azure etc and take advantage of free stuff but I am terrified something will happen and I’ll mess something up or someone will mess it up for me and I’ll be out hundreds on my credit card. Any suggestions here? Great list.

kodah 6y ago
Meh, I hate the idea of individual devs signing up for clouds like AWS, GCP, or Azure. These are huge cost machines and are designed to serve fast moving startups and hulking enterprises. The best you can do is setup account limits and alerts. The real answer is that if you have an understanding of networks and systems, then the cloud is just a data center with different considerations. Your company should be giving you resources like sandbox accounts that you can play in. This is how you'll really learn.
pkage 6y ago
I strongly recommend setting up and using virtual credit cards, you can use them to enforce spending limits and spend maximums. There are several services that allow this, for example my CC company supports them directly or there are several services that let you set them up backed by a debit card. That way, if your hosting provider overcharges you it'll just bounce.
- mycall 6y ago
  PayPal can provide virtual credit cards, if I remember correctly.
- lemarchr 6y ago
  Bills don't just magically go away if you refuse to pay them.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    They do to a degree. Nobody's going to court over a $200 bounced charge that you could argue shouldn't have been there in the first place. Most services will just close your account and move on with their lives.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

I have a Certificate in GIS and I know a little HTML and CSS and yadda, but I don't really write any programming languages. So I don't have a good sense of where they are drawing the line here for things that fit or don't fit this list. Their section on Data Visualization on Maps lacks a link to Stamen Design free tiles, available under a creative commons license. I'm wondering if people here think it's worth submitting a pull request or if that sounds like it is outside of the scope of what they are trying to curate for some reason. https://free-for.dev/#/?id=data-visualization-on-maps https://free-for.dev/#/?id=data-visualization-on-maps https://www.reddit.com/r/CitizenPlanners/comments/ezklaq/stamen_maps_free_to_use_under_creative_commons/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CitizenPlanners/comments/ezklaq/sta...

lucideer 6y ago
Stamen could definitely be added as a free tile host (as should OSM themselves), but I would specify that it's the hosting service that's being offered freely, not just the tiles themselves. While the tiles are free (CC) I would say a list of freely licenced downloadable resources/assets for devs would be much bigger/broader in scope.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Thanks. I've tried to do a little reading up on Saas, Paas and Iaas and tried to understand this a bit better. I'll try to do a pull request in the next day or two. For me, Stamen Maps have been a big deal for stuff I do. It took me forever to find something of this caliber that's suitable for my aims, but I'm just doing maps for various projects and not some kind of GIS thing.
  - lucideer 6y ago
    > I've tried to do a little reading up on Saas, Paas and Iaas and tried to understand this a bit better To distill this down for the purpose of this specific topic (map tiles): - the map tiles being provided under CC is a copyright / right-of-use / legal intellectual property thing. Nothing to do with any provision of material service by Stamen What Stamen provide that's relevant here is a service, that's somewhere vaguely in between SaaS and PaaS. - SaaS would be if Stamen provided some kind of maps website, with accounts, etc. for working with data & displaying maps. They don't really do that fully. - PaaS is a bit closer to what Stamen do: they run a server and host their own map tiles. You can point your website at their server, and they pay the hosting cost of the traffic you send there. (PaaS as a buzzword technically involves a bit more than this, but this would be a subset of it). - IaaS is an unrelated thing here: this would be like if they offered servers for you to go and host your own map tiles on, along with a load of tools for managing those servers. TL;DR: The CC-licencing of tiles is about releasing "artwork"/IP? (is there a better term for map styles??) that they've already created. Tile-hosting is about paying for internet traffic of the browsers hitting the server where those tiles live.

fomine3 6y ago

I wish this list to include term for free tier.

vmception 6y ago

for.dev is available could just register that and make the subdomain free.

ppipada 6y ago

Shout out to https://docsify.js.org/#/ https://docsify.js.org/#/ on which this site is based. Great tool to get a doc site ready in minimal time. My personal experience with this is also amazing :)

DCoder 6y ago
It's mildly amusing to see kudos for a solution that lacks any <noscript> support.

glaucon 6y ago

WRT Dynamodb the "25 Gb" free bit is not as useful as it might be because it's the Read and Write Units which might bite you and those are not directly related to data size but are also affected by how you've structured your data. It does mention the bit about the Units on the click through but I'm just saying you want to drill down into these things when it's more subtle than "so much disk" or "that many minutes of EC2". I'm not bagging the whole thing by any means, it looks like a really useful list but some things are a lot easier to understand what you're getting for free than others.

st1ck 6y ago

> Unixtime - Free API to convert Unixtime to DateTime and vice versa. Can anyone explain why would you want it as a service?

gregoriol 6y ago
It would have been perfect if on a .whynot tld
dspillett 6y ago
If you click the link, it documents the reason for its existence: "This WebService was built in 20 minutes using..." It is intended as a "next step after hello world" example for an unoriginally named low-code integrations platform, rather than being someone anyone thought someone might need it its own right.

Storm-Bringer 6y ago

forwardemail.net : if you are a Fastmail user does it provide you any benefit? Fastmail already has a catch-all feature.

Nazzareno 6y ago

I would add the "Editors" category including embeddable editors. For example TinyMCE as html editor, BEEPlugin for email/page editors...

jillesvangurp 6y ago

We've been on cloud run for the last six months. We run our monolith (Spring boot) as a Docker service. Cloud build for CI/CD. And Firestore as a not great but free database. We even increased the instance size (1GB, 2vcpus) to deal with memory issues & spring boot and it had no impact on our cost (we are still below the threshold). It's an awesome deal for basically 0$ bills every month (we pay for a few other things though) and great for us as we are a small startup bootstrapping at the moment. It more than handles our development and early access traffic. This 0$ setup gets us highly available docker + firestore for absolutely nothing until we hit the freemium threshold. We went over by a fraction of a dollar on a couple of occasions when we did big imports, etc. But we won't start paying until the point where we have recurring revenue and users basically causing increased traffic. I also like not having to deal with devops for this. No faffing around with doing terraform, setting up CI, writing complex deploy scripts, etc. Frees up a lot of my time. If you have done any of that in the past years, this is shockingly easy in comparison. A simple wizard, couple of clicks and you have your docker container building and deploying straight from github. I was not expecting this to work and but then it did on the first try. Switching the whole setup to using vms is super easy to do at any point since you can basically just tell it to run a docker container. It's nice to have that option. But then you need multiple vms, a load balancer, etc. and before you know it you are looking at more like 75/month. Add a decent database and it gets worse. High availability, worse still. And you need to do the devops to connect all these bits of infrastructure. You will blow more on staffing cost than hosting. Even a single day spend by a senior that can actually do this would cost you like 1000$. Lets be fair, it's never just a day. IMHO this is what most deployments should be like: bog standard docker thing, go run it and take care of all the things that aren't optional like giving me some dashboards, alerting, etc. and just pay for what you actually use.

paws 6y ago
> We run our monolith (Spring boot) as a Docker service Does Cloud Run's free tier 'sleep' containers when they don't get regular traffic? Several years back Heroku nerfed their free tier -- they would proactively place low traffic apps into 'sleep' mode so the next request would have a noticeable several second long delay. I ask because our SpringBoot monolith takes 30s to startup, and has bursty traffic, so I was of the expectation that Google Cloud would probably 'sleep' low traffic containers like this also. Would be nice if that were not the case.

Jyaif 6y ago

My game has been taking advantage of the GAE free tier for approximately 10 years now, only having to pay a few cents per months when there's a bump in activity. I probably could have avoided those cents by adding a little bit more caching. I highly recommend it.

treesknees 6y ago

Anyone know if there is a similar list but for university students? I know some places will give you credits or free services if you're enrolled at as a student for working on projects.

tluyben2 6y ago

Pull requests seem to be open for a while ; is this maintained actively?