Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are some great “Free” services provided by IBM, Amazon, etc.?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 52 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are some great “Free” services provided by IBM, Amazon, etc.?

#21

Post by throwaway2016a »

tootie wrote: post #10
throwaway2016a wrote: post #5

For AWS I think some of the best offerings on their free tier are Lambda and DynamoDB. Both of which have generous lifetime free tiers. Using the two of them you can have an API and database that is good enough for a lot of startups and hobby projects without paying a dime (ever). Together they are used for Amazon Alexa skills which means hosting your Amazon Alexa skill is free for most skills.

I think DynamoDB is waning in it's already limlited popularity. It has some clever ideas, but is really hard to implement. The main selling point is price, but you kinda get what you pay for.

If you can fit your use case into DynamoDB without any struggling: the performance and ease of scaling is a massive bang for your buck.

It's actually pretty easy to use too if your use case makes sense for it.

However, if your use case does not fit what DynamoDB expects, you are better off using another DB rather than try to bend DynamoDB to your will.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great “Free” services provided by IBM, Amazon, etc.?

#22

Post by 6stringmerc »

spookyuser wrote: post #15
6stringmerc wrote: post #12

If you want to try screenwriting, Story Writer by Amazon is an excellent free-to-use service. Basic, yes, but after a couple years using it I can assert it does the trick. Perfect for those wanting to 'give writing a script a try' without forking over for the industry standard Final Draft. https://storywriter.amazon.com/

How does this compare to writerduet?

Writer Duet is like staring at a Cable News Broadcast screen with all sorts of stuff everywhere in the way. To me it's visually distracting and more than I feel like using / interacting with.

Story Writer is like using a Text Editor with just enough smarts to assist with predictive Character type names and quick-to-set-up descriptions / transitions. Personally I far prefer the simplicity of Story Writer.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great “Free” services provided by IBM, Amazon, etc.?

#23

Post by forgotmysn »

6stringmerc wrote: post #12

If you want to try screenwriting, Story Writer by Amazon is an excellent free-to-use service. Basic, yes, but after a couple years using it I can assert it does the trick. Perfect for those wanting to 'give writing a script a try' without forking over for the industry standard Final Draft. https://storywriter.amazon.com/

Celtx is probably the best free-tier screenwriting software

Re: Ask HN: What are some great “Free” services provided by IBM, Amazon, etc.?

#25

Post by geoka9 »

jamiesonbecker wrote: post #8

Google offers $300 in credit that you can use on anything you like for one year as soon as you sign up right off the bat, and AWS has offered the Free Tier almost since inception. For startups, Google[1], Amazon[2], Microsoft BizSpark[3], OVH Digital Launch Pad[4], Digital Ocean[5], have startup programs that you can apply to with varying amounts of service credit (usually expiring afer one year). (Don't write off OV…

Isn't Google's $300 credit only valid for 2 months?

Re: Ask HN: What are some great “Free” services provided by IBM, Amazon, etc.?

#26

Post by 6stringmerc »

forgotmysn wrote: post #23
6stringmerc wrote: post #12

If you want to try screenwriting, Story Writer by Amazon is an excellent free-to-use service. Basic, yes, but after a couple years using it I can assert it does the trick. Perfect for those wanting to 'give writing a script a try' without forking over for the industry standard Final Draft. https://storywriter.amazon.com/

Celtx is probably the best free-tier screenwriting software

I used it years ago and as a machine-based software I'd likely agree. I seem to remember trying to load it again and seeing it wasn't freeware, or had a 30 day trial. Might be a distorted recollection, but I was looking quite intensely before selecting Story Writer. Even like Word .dot files for formatting. Nice to see competition in the space, IMO.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great “Free” services provided by IBM, Amazon, etc.?

#27

Post by BrandonY »

geoka9 wrote: post #25
jamiesonbecker wrote: post #8

Google offers $300 in credit that you can use on anything you like for one year as soon as you sign up right off the bat, and AWS has offered the Free Tier almost since inception. For startups, Google[1], Amazon[2], Microsoft BizSpark[3], OVH Digital Launch Pad[4], Digital Ocean[5], have startup programs that you can apply to with varying amounts of service credit (usually expiring afer one year). (Don't write off OV…

Isn't Google's $300 credit only valid for 2 months?

Nope, 12 months: https://cloud.google.com/free/

In addition, the $300 is only for expenses in excess of the "Always Free" usage limits, which covers quite a bit of stuff, including 5 gigs of cloud storage, 1 micro compute engine instance, and a terabyte of BigQuery queries per month.

(disclaimer: I work at Google)

Re: Ask HN: What are some great “Free” services provided by IBM, Amazon, etc.?

#28

Post by jonahx »

6stringmerc wrote: post #12

If you want to try screenwriting, Story Writer by Amazon is an excellent free-to-use service. Basic, yes, but after a couple years using it I can assert it does the trick. Perfect for those wanting to 'give writing a script a try' without forking over for the industry standard Final Draft. https://storywriter.amazon.com/

The crowd here will likely prefer the open source fountain, which is a markdown style language that can be used with your favorite editor:

https://fountain.io/

I'd recommend it to anyone -- even non-technical people -- it's a shame it wasn't what became the standard, but you can export to final draft format.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great “Free” services provided by IBM, Amazon, etc.?

#30

Post by oblib »

neonhomer wrote: post #14
oblib wrote: post #11

IBM's Cloudant is pretty sweet. I used it last year to dev some apps I was working on using CouchDB and PouchDB. It saved me the hassle of installing CouchDB and gave me the chance to play with their APIs which have some pretty nice additional features. https://cloudant.com They give you $50 of service a month for free, which was way more than I ever approached.

What advantages did you see comparing Cloudant to CouchDB?

With the release of CouchDB 2.0 there's not a lot of difference anymore, and much of what's new in that came from IBM's work on CouchDB.

Right now Cloudant offers a full text search. You can build that into a CouchDB on your own too, but it's an add on. I've been meaning to take a crack at installing it on a Raspberry Pi I have CouchDB 2.0 running on but I've not done it yet.

They might also have an enhanced version of the "Fauxton" DB manager. It's been awhile since I've logged into my account there so I don't recall how close in features they are now.

I think they have their own authentication routines that may have some advantages for some users.

Aside from that they make it really easy to just start using it. If you wanted to work with really big data sets Cloudant would be a pretty good option because you can skip all the DB setup work and have instant access a highly scalable platform that lets you get to right to work.

Post reply on HN