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You pay in other ways.

I understand if you have absolutely no money, but even then repeatedly trying to provision a server and getting a error- something like no capacity available - isn't a fun time.

Whatever, I'll pay 7$ a month to not deal with that.

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You can automate it using their API and some Python. It's like a puzzle game and I'm personally thankful for the free tier, it's pretty cool if you max it out you have multiple IPv4 addresses, IPv6 prefixes and so on - the machines boot via UEFI, you can run nixos and ZFS on them, you have a serial console via ssh/vnc and at least in Germany they have good connectivity and 10tb Traffic is plenty. Using it for something serious? Probably not. But for tinkering it's pretty cool and interesting if you enjoying some small quests. Running incus and some Kubernetes stuff on an arm box and 24gb memory and 200gb SSD is at least 10-20€ elsewhere.

I had a script calling their apis to setup one of their free arm instances after I deleted the one I had to change the OS (something I had done before).

After running every hour for several months I gave up (always out of capacity and it was impossible to change the region on free tier back then). They either had a bug that still showed my account as using the deleted resources or no capacity, both which seem out of place in a “cloud” infrastructure.

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