Hacker News Reader

Depending what core that is, you get more on the Google Cloud free tier (600MB RAM, 30GB disk). But: only 30GB outgoing bandwidth.

Thought it was 1G transfer max (not sure which direction or both)

That's really cheap, you couldn't even run a RPi at home for that.

What do you use it for?

I would use for anything I put on a RPi: a DNS server, a MQTT backend, some light backends for a web app (I need to connect to some light services and prices their output into a JSON), a monitoring service,...