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Ask HN: What cool stuff do you run free-tier?

85 points by coopreme 5y ago

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)

LinuxBender 5y ago
Since you mentioned Geocities, Neocities [1] [1] - https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
kingkongjaffa 5y ago
I don’t do anything with the services but hopefully this can inspire: https://free-for.dev/#/ https://free-for.dev/#/ https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev
cldellow 5y ago
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 https://sketchviz.com/new
- coopreme 5y ago
  Bravo. Very cool leveraging services this way, I like your idea of architecting to optimize free tier svcs.
- zoover2020 5y ago
  Cool stuff! Inspiring :)
- watermelon0 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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?
      - cldellow 5y ago
        It's just a number, I haven't looked at any request logs to see what hit rates are like. From a money perspective, expiring them never would be fine, and a good trade off to get better latency on subsequent loads. However, if the underlying gist is deleted, I'd like the PNG to eventually go away.
- sireat 5y ago
  Super cool! Curious does your implementation of DOT support embedding of images? Theoretically it should be possible: http://www.graphviz.org/doc/info/attrs.html#d:image http://www.graphviz.org/doc/info/attrs.html#d:image
postpawl 5y ago
I use Netlify’s free tier to host static sites.
justusthane 5y ago
My personal website[1] is hosted free on Github Pages (built with Eleventy). [1]: https://www.justus.ws/ https://www.justus.ws/
- amagasaki 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Thanks for the heads up—false positive. I submitted an issue with MetaMask to have it removed.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
r614 5y ago
I like vercel a lot, does the same thing as Netlify. Also using Supabase and Feta for some other projects! r614.dev
- thescribbblr 5y ago
  Feta?
seanwilson 5y ago
I run a paid Chrome extension (with a free tier!) that audits websites for best practices: https://www.checkbot.io/ 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 5y ago
  Just downloaded and I'm seriously impressed! Thanks for maintaining the extension, can see myself using it for years to come.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
marstall 5y ago
a customizable feed of indie label new releases: https://dill.vercel.app https://dill.vercel.app
mark_l_watson 5y ago
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 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 https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson
luke2m 5y ago
I run my matrix homeserver and ssh proxy for stuff hosted at home on Oracle free. They also offer ARM vms now.
maxwelldone 5y ago
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 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 5y ago
  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")
  - maxwelldone 5y ago
    Thanks mate! Interestingly,The Simpsons was the show that sort of inspired me to build this site. I saw an image on reddit showing all the Simpsons episode ratings and thought it would be a fun idea to build a website based on the concept.
- ohashi 5y ago
  I like the simplicity, nicely done. On the homepage there is a giant empty spot on the right, not sure if that was intentional or something isn't loading. If there's nothing there now, maybe a screenshot of a sample show would be a nice way to introduce it.
  - maxwelldone 5y ago
    Thanks mate. You're right, on big screens (< 5% of users) the empty spot is a bit of a concern. I'll try to add a gif of a demo. Honestly, this was a build, automate and forget type of weekend project. So I forced myself to stop adding features but can certainly find some time to improve it a bit.
- tyroh 5y ago
  awesome work! makes it easier to figure out what to watch first in a new series, and even if it's worth watching. I also appreciate the snapiness due to not using external APIs.
paulgb 5y ago
I run https://ranked.vote https://ranked.vote on Netlify’s free tier. https://notify.run 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 https://treeverse.app uses Lambda/S3/Netlify on either free or pennies-per-month tier.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
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.
bckygldstn 5y ago
I run https://thisstartupacquisitionannouncementdoesnotexist.ajnisbet.com https://thisstartupacquisitionannouncementdoesnotexist.ajnis... on the free tier of Google App Engine. And https://www.redditreads.com https://www.redditreads.com on the free tier of Google Compute Engine.
mikhmha 5y ago
https://algot.io https://algot.io I use the free tier for firebase to store real time trade data. The front-end was built using Next.js and hosted using the Vercel free tier.
stfurkan 5y ago
I run https://gez.la https://gez.la on Vercel's free tier.
visox 5y ago
http://algostrategies.io http://algostrategies.io A FE only solution to find trading strategies. Paying only for domain, lives in Amazon s3
yboris 5y ago
My commercial project Video Hub App is nearly free: https://videohubapp.com/ https://videohubapp.com/ It's a Gatsby website and I used to use Vercel with their free deployments, but because I also needed a subdomain with PHP I switched to my cheap $3/month (unlimited website) webhost to serve the static files; but I also use Cloudflare for their free CDN. And the app demos are hosted on GitHub through Releases. The storefront is "free" through Chec.io in that I only pay a small fraction of every transaction. Huge thank you to Vercel for making deploying Gatsby websites so easy (I run https://yboris.dev/ https://yboris.dev/ and https://yboris.com/ https://yboris.com/ through them for free). Huge thank you to GitHub (I run https://income-inequality.info/ https://income-inequality.info/ through it).
czhu12 5y ago
My favorite stack is now google cloud run + DynamoDB. I built a little template for myself to quickly start new projects, that is also hosted with this free tier: https://forever-free-cloud-app-starter.chriszhu.me/ https://forever-free-cloud-app-starter.chriszhu.me/
- gitgud 5y ago
  So it's using Google Cloud Run and Amazon Dynamo DB? Seems weird to mix cloud platforms like that
firemelt 5y ago
heroku
gitgud 5y ago
- Firebase have a very generous free tier - Github pages is always great
rozenmd 5y ago
In running OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com/ https://onlineornot.com/) which itself has a generous free tier, about 5 days of the month I rely on AWS's free tier for AWS Lambda, I managed to run on Vercel.com's free tier with Next.js until around my 8th paying customer, and my business update newsletter relies on ConvertKit's free tier.