> Could you elucidate?

I sure can.

It looks like I'm using the $5/month 1GB/1CPU/25GB droplet running Ubuntu 18 LTS, and just imagined that I was using a free one.

Memory sucks.

An engineering approximation to free?

I saw this from IBM which doesn't appear to even need a credit card. :0 https://www.ibm.com/cloud/free/ But I haven't checked it out yet.

I think that Azure and GCE have better free tiers than AWS, but I'm guessing the bandwidth metering may work against a vpn use.