Ask HN: What cool stuff do you run free-tier? • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by seanwilson » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

I run a paid Chrome extension (with a free tier!) that audits websites for best practices:

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.

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

#12

Post by marstall » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

a customizable feed of indie label new releases: https://dill.vercel.app

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

#13

Post by mark_l_watson » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

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 (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

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

#14

Post by luke2m » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

I run my matrix homeserver and ssh proxy for stuff hosted at home on Oracle free. They also offer ARM vms now.

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

#15

Post by watermelon0 » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 7:07 PM UTC

cldellow wrote: post #3

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…

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?

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

#16

Post by maxwelldone » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

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

I built it mainly for personal use. I know IMDb ratings aren't perfect but it's a decent measure of mass opinion.

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

#17

Post by cldellow » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

watermelon0 wrote: post #15

cldellow wrote: post #3

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…

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?

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.

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

#18

Post by paulgb » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 7:32 PM UTC

I run https://ranked.vote on Netlify’s free tier.

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 uses Lambda/S3/Netlify on either free or pennies-per-month tier.

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

#19

Post by thescribbblr » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 8:01 PM UTC

r614 wrote: post #10

I like vercel a lot, does the same thing as Netlify. Also using Supabase and Feta for some other projects! r614.dev

Feta?

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

#20

Post by amagasaki » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 8:03 PM UTC

justusthane wrote: post #8

My personal website[1] is hosted free on Github Pages (built with Eleventy). [1]: https://www.justus.ws/

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.