For example, say I was to build a web scraper; I could use Google Sheets as storage, Telegram’s API to send notifications, and could deploy on a Raspberry Pi (not free, but cheap and a one time expense).
What free or cheap services do you find invaluable for such projects?
- Cloudflare free "reverse proxy" to use https on custom domain (Heroku won't do that for free)
- ImprovMX email forwarding, as for sending, you can abuse Gmail (or likely any other email service), and setup DKIM signing to remove the "via gmail.com" mark and have your emails trusted
- freenom.com free domains
- Heroku postgres and redis, if you run into the 10k rows limit, ElephantSQL (i don't remember the limitations there) or setup a postgres server on GCP compute engine
My go to stack on heroku on hobby projects: Frontend React, Backend node js, database postgres. I can have all of that for free, even logging with papertrail. I can also move that stack from heroku if I would ever need that.
I only use Netlify for static websites, some deployed with git, some manually by drag and drop. The other stuff is on heroku like I wrote.
I eventually moved the service to a $5 vps + crontab because I wanted to manually set the cache control headers when serving my scraped data (updated hourly)