6 ms·

Free Tiers and Resources for Developers

137 points by judohacker 4y ago

vulkan92 4y ago
This is a very useful resource! Thanks to the author :) I was looking exactly something like this as a DevOps Engineer who wants to play around during the spare time to sharpen my own skills but avoid using any company resources!
avgDev 4y ago
I'm surprised GitPages are not in the web hosting section, it is an extremely popular option for hosting static pages?
- Etheryte 4y ago
  Did you mean Github Pages? Git is to Github roughly like mp3 is to Bandcamp or jpg is to Imgur, they're not the same thing.
  - avgDev 4y ago
    I did mean GitHub Pages, thought it was called GitPages.
    - geekrax 4y ago
      It does mention GitHub pages under GitHub.
pSYoniK 4y ago
Just posting it here as well (have done so before), but beware the Oracle Cloud one. I've had tons of issues getting my account deleted, it's been more than a year and I'm still having to raise tickets and go back and forth. The resources are nice and they can easily run a small page or be useful to try out hosting things, deploying apps and general server maintenance/deployment/etc. However, anything you will be running on them shouldn't be essential to you. For ex, the ARM VPSes will actually switch off/get disabled at the end of the first monthly trial and I believe (feel free to correct me on this) that you will need to get some support to enable any VM you setup in the trial. Although the resource is always free, the first month is treated differently for whatever reason and you end up with a disabled VM. You can create new ones within those limits again, just fyi. The entire platform is also unnecessarily convoluted, but I'd argue that's the case with most of these cloud providers - felt the same way trying AWS for a project and I feel the same way every day using Azure. However, out of these offerings, Oracle's is the most generous free one, just keep in mind it's just that - free. So you do get what you pay for.
- fariszr 4y ago
  > For ex, the ARM VPSes will actually switch off/get disabled at the end of the first monthly trial and I believe (feel free to correct me on this) that you will need to get some support to enable any VM you setup in the trial. Although the resource is always free, the first month is treated differently for whatever reason and you end up with a disabled VM. You can create new ones within those limits again, just fyi. I tried this, and it will worked, so I'm not really sure. I recreated the VM anyway just to be safe.
  - pSYoniK 4y ago
    You can recreate it, it's just the original VM you setup gets disabled, so it's about any services you had running on that particular VM. Sorry, I wasn't clear in my explanation.
- angulardragon03 4y ago
  It’s a bit convoluted with the VM getting disabled a month in (and very annoying), but the fix is pretty easy. You can delete the old VM (keeping the boot disk), and recreate it with the original boot disk. New public IP address will be assigned, but after that you won’t have issues. I’ve been running my instance for almost a solid year without issues since the month trial ended.
  - pSYoniK 4y ago
    I agree it can be fixed, it was more of a cautionary tale - you go ahead and set something up and 30 days down the line it's not responding. Depending on what you might've played with, you now have to start from scratch. I was using it to do a setup from scratch for a Wireguard VPN and being still early on I was going through things one at a time so didn't have any scripts setup to run the whole setup on a new machine. I had lost quite a bit of work - again; early days.
vanillax 4y ago
Another great resource similar to OP's but for self hosting https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
fariszr 4y ago
Honestly nothing compares to Oracle cloud free tier. Its amazing, you have a better VPS than 15$ per month can get you on any VPS host, even if its ARM, its worth it. As for CI/CD, I didn't know GiLlab gives you 50,000 minutes for public projects, the issue with gitlab is the recent limits make it really complex for an open source project to grow on GitLab, Yes I know there is the Gitlab Open source program, but its an unnecessary complications that doesn't exist on GitHub.
- soperj 4y ago
  My history with Oracle tells me that whatever you're getting from them can't be worth it.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    I've been using the free tier for two years and am yet to run into anything shady. Saved me countless bucks in the meantime (before arguing that it's like two seconds of work for you, remember that other countries do exist, and even something like DigitalOcean is pretty costly for many of us). Unlike many other free tiers you are not able to create any paid resources unless you opt in into the paid tier.
    - brnt 4y ago
      When you sign up with Oracle, you need to provider a CC. How can you guarantee that you're not accidentally opting in into any paid tier?
      - microbass 4y ago
        I signed up with a virtual Revolut card for sign up. Once my account was active, I deleted the card. They can't get any money out of me.
        brnt 4y ago
        Here that would not matter from a legal standpoint. They'd can and will get the money from you through small claims. My question is: how can you be sure you're not billed, as the post I responded to implied, if you entered payment details?
frankgrecojr 4y ago
Confluent has an amazing free tier that lets you use a hosted Kafka cluster for free.
- dan_quixote 4y ago
  The venn diagram intersection of projects that "use so little resources that free tier is feasible" and "need kafka" has to be vanishingly small...
  - chrisshroba 4y ago
    Still cool as a learning tool!
tootie 4y ago
Algolia is a really nice platform, but they definitely nickel and dime you with the free tier. It says 10K free search "operations" which includes every type-ahead or any other API request. We hit our monthly limit with just bot traffic in 2 weeks.
anonymousDan 4y ago
One thing I noticed after my initial experiments with serverless is that it is very hard to do basic development and testing locally (i.e. without potentially running the risk of a big bill). I would have thought there would be mocks of all major services that would permit you to do straightforward local development and testing.
- getcrunk 4y ago
  So at least cloudflare wrangler cli let's you test serverless locally. And iirc Google firebase (db) has a local emulator
zoomzoom 4y ago
Our developer experience platform, Coherence, just opened up a free beta for Google Cloud Platform (AWS coming soon) at withcoherence.com. We will always offer a free plan… It’s a great way to get the most out of a cloud’s free tier - we help you deploy a production-quality app onto the cloud infrastructure in your own cloud account. And we add integrated cloud IDE, cloud shell, and a dashboard on top of it. Feedback welcome!
Havoc 4y ago
>[Oracle] 2 IPv4 for VMs, 1 IPv4 for load balancer I've definitely used 4x IPv4s on an unpaid account. >redislabs - Free 30MB redis instance This runs on GCP btw, US east1 from what I can tell, so super low latency in that combination

137 points by judohacker 4y ago

This is a very useful resource! Thanks to the author :) I was looking exactly something like this as a DevOps Engineer who wants to play around during the spare time to sharpen my own skills but avoid using any company resources!

avgDev 4y ago

I'm surprised GitPages are not in the web hosting section, it is an extremely popular option for hosting static pages?

Etheryte 4y ago
Did you mean Github Pages? Git is to Github roughly like mp3 is to Bandcamp or jpg is to Imgur, they're not the same thing.
- avgDev 4y ago
  I did mean GitHub Pages, thought it was called GitPages.
  - geekrax 4y ago
    It does mention GitHub pages under GitHub.

pSYoniK 4y ago

Just posting it here as well (have done so before), but beware the Oracle Cloud one. I've had tons of issues getting my account deleted, it's been more than a year and I'm still having to raise tickets and go back and forth. The resources are nice and they can easily run a small page or be useful to try out hosting things, deploying apps and general server maintenance/deployment/etc. However, anything you will be running on them shouldn't be essential to you. For ex, the ARM VPSes will actually switch off/get disabled at the end of the first monthly trial and I believe (feel free to correct me on this) that you will need to get some support to enable any VM you setup in the trial. Although the resource is always free, the first month is treated differently for whatever reason and you end up with a disabled VM. You can create new ones within those limits again, just fyi. The entire platform is also unnecessarily convoluted, but I'd argue that's the case with most of these cloud providers - felt the same way trying AWS for a project and I feel the same way every day using Azure. However, out of these offerings, Oracle's is the most generous free one, just keep in mind it's just that - free. So you do get what you pay for.

fariszr 4y ago
> For ex, the ARM VPSes will actually switch off/get disabled at the end of the first monthly trial and I believe (feel free to correct me on this) that you will need to get some support to enable any VM you setup in the trial. Although the resource is always free, the first month is treated differently for whatever reason and you end up with a disabled VM. You can create new ones within those limits again, just fyi. I tried this, and it will worked, so I'm not really sure. I recreated the VM anyway just to be safe.
- pSYoniK 4y ago
  You can recreate it, it's just the original VM you setup gets disabled, so it's about any services you had running on that particular VM. Sorry, I wasn't clear in my explanation.
angulardragon03 4y ago
It’s a bit convoluted with the VM getting disabled a month in (and very annoying), but the fix is pretty easy. You can delete the old VM (keeping the boot disk), and recreate it with the original boot disk. New public IP address will be assigned, but after that you won’t have issues. I’ve been running my instance for almost a solid year without issues since the month trial ended.
- pSYoniK 4y ago
  I agree it can be fixed, it was more of a cautionary tale - you go ahead and set something up and 30 days down the line it's not responding. Depending on what you might've played with, you now have to start from scratch. I was using it to do a setup from scratch for a Wireguard VPN and being still early on I was going through things one at a time so didn't have any scripts setup to run the whole setup on a new machine. I had lost quite a bit of work - again; early days.

vanillax 4y ago

Another great resource similar to OP's but for self hosting https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

fariszr 4y ago

Honestly nothing compares to Oracle cloud free tier. Its amazing, you have a better VPS than 15$ per month can get you on any VPS host, even if its ARM, its worth it. As for CI/CD, I didn't know GiLlab gives you 50,000 minutes for public projects, the issue with gitlab is the recent limits make it really complex for an open source project to grow on GitLab, Yes I know there is the Gitlab Open source program, but its an unnecessary complications that doesn't exist on GitHub.

soperj 4y ago
My history with Oracle tells me that whatever you're getting from them can't be worth it.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  I've been using the free tier for two years and am yet to run into anything shady. Saved me countless bucks in the meantime (before arguing that it's like two seconds of work for you, remember that other countries do exist, and even something like DigitalOcean is pretty costly for many of us). Unlike many other free tiers you are not able to create any paid resources unless you opt in into the paid tier.
  - brnt 4y ago
    When you sign up with Oracle, you need to provider a CC. How can you guarantee that you're not accidentally opting in into any paid tier?
    - microbass 4y ago
      I signed up with a virtual Revolut card for sign up. Once my account was active, I deleted the card. They can't get any money out of me.
      - brnt 4y ago
        Here that would not matter from a legal standpoint. They'd can and will get the money from you through small claims. My question is: how can you be sure you're not billed, as the post I responded to implied, if you entered payment details?

frankgrecojr 4y ago

Confluent has an amazing free tier that lets you use a hosted Kafka cluster for free.

dan_quixote 4y ago
The venn diagram intersection of projects that "use so little resources that free tier is feasible" and "need kafka" has to be vanishingly small...
- chrisshroba 4y ago
  Still cool as a learning tool!

tootie 4y ago

Algolia is a really nice platform, but they definitely nickel and dime you with the free tier. It says 10K free search "operations" which includes every type-ahead or any other API request. We hit our monthly limit with just bot traffic in 2 weeks.

anonymousDan 4y ago

One thing I noticed after my initial experiments with serverless is that it is very hard to do basic development and testing locally (i.e. without potentially running the risk of a big bill). I would have thought there would be mocks of all major services that would permit you to do straightforward local development and testing.

getcrunk 4y ago
So at least cloudflare wrangler cli let's you test serverless locally. And iirc Google firebase (db) has a local emulator

zoomzoom 4y ago

Our developer experience platform, Coherence, just opened up a free beta for Google Cloud Platform (AWS coming soon) at withcoherence.com. We will always offer a free plan… It’s a great way to get the most out of a cloud’s free tier - we help you deploy a production-quality app onto the cloud infrastructure in your own cloud account. And we add integrated cloud IDE, cloud shell, and a dashboard on top of it. Feedback welcome!

Havoc 4y ago

>[Oracle] 2 IPv4 for VMs, 1 IPv4 for load balancer I've definitely used 4x IPv4s on an unpaid account. >redislabs - Free 30MB redis instance This runs on GCP btw, US east1 from what I can tell, so super low latency in that combination