Oracle has an extremely generous free tier, as long as you register a credit card with them: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

> All tenancies get the first 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month for free for VM instances using the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape, which has an Arm processor. For Always Free tenancies, this is equivalent to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of memory.

It's a bit sketchy since... well, Oracle, but you do get a decent machine. I've been using one for a while with no complaints.

You can afford the openai api costs but don’t want to spend a few dollars on a better host and you would rather reimplement your product?

Can the friend help you $5/m because I find the Digital Ocean app service or droplets to be pretty decent. Like load time faster than eye refresh fast probably because I send out cache headers and it CDNs them.

Then maybe grab a free Postgres DB from Vercel or similar to get started (as their DB isn’t cheap)

Another avenue which I find more of a hassle but it is free and scales up is static hosting (Netlify, Vercel, etc.) with Firebase. You might pay 1-2c a month if you use it a little. But wouldn’t recommend rewriting just to save money when $60 should do you for a year of hosting.

Vercel? It depends on what exactly you're hosting (eg whether it has a lot of serverless calls) but the free plan will get you pretty far. And it's cached behind a CDN. For a basic static site it has pretty good limits.

Vercel is basically a managed wrapper on top of other cloud services, including AWS and Cloudflare and various CDNs.

But it's much easier to use and doesn't require you to separately spin up a bunch of different accounts at different providers to get the same level of service.

Also the pro plan is $20 and gets you much more.

They are the owners of Next.js and my guess is their lower free and pro plans are loss leaders for their enterprise offerings. It's a great service for getting your project off the ground though. You can go from a repo to a hosted website in like 2 minutes.

I used to use Nearlyfreespeech.net before them for ultra cheap hosting, but Vercel is a much nicer platform overall.

go the extra mile of studying yc's free startupschool.org curriculum. come up with a project, look for a cofounder there, post your weekly updates there, and apply for yc startup school deals. you will get $5k in aws, $2k in gcp, $1k in do, waived fees in stripe, discounted company setup in stripe atlas and clerky.

best case you build a startup and turn your life around, worst case you build a project that improves your skillset. yc is very supportive regardless if you get in or not.

I have a go service running on one instance 1vcpu and 0.5gb ram that can handle 5-7k rps. For like a couple bucks basically per month.

I use embedded db to serve as a disk cache and allocate 10gb ssd.

If your home connection is fast enough, just put a spare or cheap dedicated machine on your router and host everything yourself instead of in the cloud.

Does anywhere offer free hosting for a stake in the company?