Stack on a Budget – A collection of services with great free tiers | Hacker News Reader

Stack on a Budget – A collection of services with great free tiers

github.com

156 pointsrosstex26 comments

Another good resource, on similar lines that I've come across: https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev/blob/master/README...

Hi thanks for the feedback, do not hesitate to open issues to request new services and allow me to easily track them ;)

Yesterday I was looking for something like Recurly that also has a free tier, I ended up finding a service I hadn't heard of before called ChargeBee (it has a launch tier for up to $50k free). Does anyone have any experience with them or know of any other alternatives with a free tier?

Also, to the author, I would add the github student pack to that list you can get $100 of DigitalOcean credit for free among other things.

https://education.github.com/pack

I've done tons of work with them building out billing platforms for multiple clients. They are fairly good for many use cases and as long as you are keeping within standard use cases, they aren't bad. That said, if you are looking to do really simple subscriptions, Stripe's built-in subscription support is pretty good.

Did you have any specific questions about them?

What would you recommend if you aren't within the standard use cases. Are there more flexible services out there, or at some point do you just roll your own?

They are fairly flexible with some weird exceptions. What is the scenario here?

Having recently had compose.io delete my data on a free tier I suggest NEVER doing this... It might seem to work well enough for smaller sites, but one day, out of the blue, when you least expect it, they will delete your data.

Can I also recommend if you are decomissioning a free tier please switch access to the server off (firewall rules) before deleting the data and the backups! You can even charge for the data if people haven't responded to any emails you have sent.

Perhaps taking your experience with compose.io and applying it to all fifty-or-so services listed in this page is a bit excessive? Surely, Google Cloud isn't going to turn around and delete your data from its Datastore. It has an SLA, and I'm fairly sure the terms of service do not cover Google deleting your data at will in case you haven't passed the free tier.

My trust of cloud for many things has dropped markedly, unless it's some form of private cloud.

Google has a long history of pulling the plug on things. Even successful things. Basecamp went from always going to offer a free tier to $99 a month cheapest (well only) tier. Now add in the countless acquisistions of "We're delighted to announce we got bought. Oh the service that got us there? It's dead. Please bugger off. Thanks for the exciting journey" style.

Granted for a fair number even paying wouldn't save you.

1. Google can at any time close your account for "suspicious activity". Good luck finding a support person to talk to then.

2. They have in past changed the free quotas so drastically that datastore operations have failed resulting in loss of service and or data

Emailing: +sendgrid; Realtime Infrastructure: +ably, +pubnub

Kubernetes automation & pipelines

https://www.distelli.com

disclaimer: I'm the founder.

I don't see Azure anywhere on this list (in any categories). It's only mentioned in the context of other services.

I use the free tier of multiple Azure services for my tiny side project [1]

[1] https://jobrudder.com

Exception notifications :

https://rollbar.com/

Does anyone know of a good open-source alternative to rollbar?

Have a look at https://github.com/getsentry/sentry.

The AWS Free Tier should list under limitations the fact that the small free/inexpensive instances are severely resource throttled which kicks in at inopportune times.

Great resource. Thanks for posting this.

Is this only for SaaS free tiers or are completely free/Open source options ok?

they are ok too of course :) the idea is to be able to develope/host/deploy... for free!

opened a PR!

Here's another stack on a budget: roll your own!

Modern web programming reminds me a lot of WWI Europe, just before Franz Ferdinand's assassination

This is assuming your time is worth $0. It took me a long time and a lot of waste before I realised that sometimes it's easier to pay.

Same old arguments. If you know what you're doing it doesn't take so long, a lot of this tech stuff is made to be more complex than it really is. Our field has been overrun with people who seem to love to overcomplexify this stuff so as to justify their position and budgets.

What a jobs program the cloud is!

I work for a company that does not use any kind of cloud services on the basis that they could be in a situation where there's no money to pay the monthly bill. So we buy servers, equipment, licenses, etc. It's insane. We spend a lot of time implementing open source solutions that are half-baked.

Any cost analysis would clearly show what we do is inneficient but fear trumps it all.

We use some nonessential cloud services to fill in a few gaps where I am at, mainly an email gateway and VPS. So in actuality I agree with some of the other comment.

But what I've found, in minimizing our dependencies on the cloud, is that for a small increase in implementation time (which isnt so bad because, again, people actually know what they're doing after some training) we have almost zero problems that we can't immediately go back and fix ourselves. And my shit gets done on time, and under budget.

edit: Also, resiliency is a legitimate business concern/objective. Sucks that you can't blame any problems on cloud providers tho :)

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