
Ask HN: Best free compute and other resources for startups? - spdustin
I&#x27;m interested in pursuing a few new concepts, and I&#x27;m looking for the best free resources for startups that aren&#x27;t going through an incubator. Specifically looking for free tier or startup credits beyond what AWS &#x2F; DO &#x2F; GCP has to offer, or for off-the-beaten-path programs that single-founder startups might be able to take advantage of. I&#x27;ll be using Stripe for processing any payments.<p>What do you folks use when you&#x27;re looking to stand up your MVPs?
======
simon_weber
I'm something of a free tier connoisseur, and recently built an entire project
with 13 forever-free tiers. It was more of a personal challenge than a
business decision, but it might be a good reference for what's out there:
[https://www.simonmweber.com/2018/07/09/running-kleroteria-
fo...](https://www.simonmweber.com/2018/07/09/running-kleroteria-for-free-by-
abusing-free-tiers.html)

Some other services not mentioned there that I've used for free recently:

\- humio cloud for log aggregation

\- nodequery for server monitoring (though its future is unclear)

\- braintree used to waive a big chunk of payment fees ($50k?) for startups,
but I'm not sure the program exists anymore

Beyond things that are literally free, I'm a big fan of cheap vps providers if
your uptime can take it and you can do your own ops. One of my projects makes
~$200/month and is hosted for $6/year on a 256MB vps. Lowendtalk/Lowendbox is
the usual place I find these.

~~~
pythonbase
Have heard horror stories about the cheap VPS offered at LowEndTalk and
similar outfits. What's your average up time? and can you recommend any
service provider?

~~~
simon_weber
Pings from instances to nodequery are 98% on the low end and 99.9% on the high
end. It looks like I'm at 500+ days up at impactvps.com, though I used to see
cpu and disk degradations somewhat regularly with them. I haven't had any
major outages in a few years of use, though one provider went bust recently
after an overly-aggressive sale (alpharacks).

I generally run one instance + sqlite and accept the downtime. The next step
up might be two vms across two providers + a cheap managed db.

I don't think I have any super strong recommendations. I did become a fan of
BuyVM recently due to their $1/month shared sql plan. But, they're apparently
they're planning to retire it, which puts them at a similar price point as
something like vultr.

~~~
pythonbase
Thanks for sharing the insights. Do you think one should stick with $5/month
droplets or hit and try the low end VPS?

~~~
simon_weber
Depends on the use case. I think the main factors are reliability and
security: if it's not a crucial service and isn't handling anything sensitive,
then there's no reason to pay more.

------
013a
Heroku's free tier is good. GCP App Engine is pretty similar, a little more
powerful, but also more limiting in how you build your app.

My pick for MVPs is AWS Lambda. It's very easy to get up and running, and you
get access to the rich AWS ecosystem. Yeah yeah, the "unlimited scale" benefit
will be great when you're accelerating user growth, but that's not why its a
good pick for MVPs. Need a cron? Not too bad on App Engine, but pretty hard on
Heroku. Cinch on Lambda. Aggregated logs? Easy on most managed platforms. How
about distributed tracing? Ridiculously easy on lambda. Need a quick queue?
Horrible on heroku, alright on google cloud, but on AWS? Create one on SQS,
wire it up to a lambda, done. There's a learning curve, but the power of the
AWS platform is really what makes lambda a great choice.

~~~
eropple
The difficult part with AWS is local development. Waiting on AWS deploys is
not a fast process and it kills momentum.

LocalStack tries, but IMO it's not great.

~~~
ElFitz
Cleanly separate your logic from AWS dependencies using interfaces /
protocols, summarily mock the required service by implementing said protocols
(sparing you the pain of mocking the AWS services themselves), and voilà,
you're running everything locally.

It's easy. But if that's too much for you, the serverless framework has some
nice plugins for all of it.

~~~
eropple
I understand what one can do to create a leaky abstraction for local
development. And it is leaky, and it can't be relied upon for correctness, and
so while it makes "getting things done" possible, it makes getting things done
_correctly_ much more difficult than it needs to be.

And local development when you've opted to use systems like Cognito are well
beyond its scope, unless someone has something very clever that I haven't
seen.

From a lot of experience doing this on AWS and on other clouds, I have learned
that it is better to use systems that you can operate, and then use hosted
versions where applicable. RDS is great, but it's great mostly because you can
run PostgreSQL locally and inspect its brain. DynamoDB, SQS, etc. tend to be
untrustworthy and should be avoided unless you have a bulletproof story for
local testing (and none of the fake implementations are bulletproof).

~~~
nicoburns
I avoid systems like Cognito for that reason! SQS I've found to be ok when
used as a backend for an abstraction. E.g. Laravel has a generic queue library
that can be backed by file or redis or sql, ans using redis locally with SQS
in production worked quite well with this.

~~~
eropple
SQS has different characteristics from a Redis queue or a RabbitMQ queue.
That's the source of a lot of my nervousness around it: when those
abstractions break and somebody-who-isn't-me has to debug it.

(I actually _have_ an answer for local dev with Cognito because my current
employer already had Cognito when I showed up, but it amounts to "have
configurable signing keys and sign your own JWT in dev".)

------
deforciant
I think a combination of hardware and cloud services could give you a cheap
way to run pretty much anything you want. I will try to share what I am using
:)

Tooling

For CI I bought a cheap Intel NUC that just sits on my table and runs Drone,
Node-RED, my testing environment server.

1\. Here from Drone I get all the test pipelines and most of my
executable/docker image builds at a much better speed than I would get with
Travis, CircleCI and so on. My desktop runs a Drone agent too, so never
waiting too long for new builds. 2\. Node-RED is used for various automation
tasks such as healthchecks for all my services with rate-limits, a bit more
complex checks (rather than just simple /health or /status endpoint ping),
mailgun webhook handling, github brew formula updates and so on. It does
control my TV too :D 3\. I also run some tasks on Google Cloud builder which
is free and fast. 4\. Uptimerobot is also used
([http://uptimerobot.com/](http://uptimerobot.com/)) as it provides free,
second opinion whether my services are down or not.

Compute

For compute I opted for GKE (at the time it was the best managed k8s you can
get (and it's still probably is)) on Google Cloud with 3 1vCPU 3.75GB RAM VMs.
That gives me plenty of resources to run my stack and any additional side-
side-project on it. I tend to code in Go so I don't need much resources. I use
managed postgres as a database so I can sleep peacefully.

For additional services I ended up choosing Vultr
([https://www.vultr.com/](https://www.vultr.com/)) as they have many regions
available and their pricing is really good. There is a nice, non-official CLI
and so far their uptime was quite good (few issues but nothing major).

It really depends how much time you want to spend on ops. If you are fine with
doing quite a bit of ops, go with Vultr or any other cheaper cloud provider.
If you want to spend more time on features, go with GKE and fully automate
deployment. Git push -> Google Cloud Builder -> Keel
([https://keel.sh](https://keel.sh)) -> new version deployed :)

------
RyanShook
If you publish a free Alexa Skill (easy to make a basic one) you can apply for
$100 in monthly free AWS credits: [https://developer.amazon.com/en-
US/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/al...](https://developer.amazon.com/en-
US/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/alexa-aws-credits)

~~~
aiddun
Same thing for Google Assistant actions, which give $200 in monthly credits.

------
voidmain0001
Software Engineering Daily had a recent discussion with the founder of
render.com, Anurag Goel, and I learned that it provides static sites for free,
and services starting at $5 so it's what I'm reviewing now. Render appears to
be using K8s and Docker containers to create instances from Github repos.
Anurag gave a reasonable explanation of why he thinks render.com is superior
to Heroku at 29:15:5 in the transcript.
[https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-
content/uploads/2019...](https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-
content/uploads/2019/06/SED852-Render.pdf)

~~~
anurag
Render founder here. Happy to answer questions.

------
tonymet
I'll tell you from personal experience--dont let free tiers influence your
tech decisions. your early lock in decisions are the most costly and you will
pay dearly long after the free tiers run out

~~~
quickthrower2
This is worth considering, especially when you can get a DO droplet for
$5/month and run whatever free software you like on there on Ubuntu. That has
to be as un-locked-in as it gets. You could run the same thing from a Rasb-Pi
at home!

I am happy to use Netlify as a static file host as that isn't much of a lock
in: I can move to S3 later, or even the DO droplet and Nginx!

------
yingw787
Linode is $5/mo. and I got a $50 credit for just being at a software
conference; I also don't think that expires (which is good because I'm not
planning on using that credit atm). That's 10 months of free service.

It's also pretty barebones in terms of upsold services, but apparently the
customer support is pretty top-notch. I'd take a look at it.

~~~
cmsimike
All my credits seemed to expire after two months.

~~~
yingw787
This comment spooked me so I went back to my emails and checked what Linode
said:

> The $50 credit can give you up to 10 months of hosting on our 1GB plan. You
> can also use the credit towards our add-on services such as backups, Block
> Storage, or NodeBalancers. Use the promo code today!

So they mentioned 10 months in the email, and I searched a bit further and
didn't see anything about service credit expiration. You can also get service
credits using referrals, coupon sites, and even blog posts:

[https://www.linode.com/community/questions/8788/share-
your-l...](https://www.linode.com/community/questions/8788/share-your-linode-
experience-get-100-service-credit)

Airbnb cereal and all that. [https://medium.com/@austincoleschafer/a-short-
story-about-ho...](https://medium.com/@austincoleschafer/a-short-story-about-
how-airbnb-funded-their-startup-with-cereal-boxes-ac6e62cf4c4c)

------
jmhyer123
Check out [https://github.com/255kb/stack-on-a-
budget](https://github.com/255kb/stack-on-a-budget) for a great list of
services/resources that offer free tiers to get you started.

------
taecano
Best compilation of free resources I've come across:
[https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev](https://github.com/ripienaar/free-
for-dev)

Also: [http://www.lowendtalk.com](http://www.lowendtalk.com)

------
jchook
Linode has a $5 “nanode” VPS and scales very cheaply compared to AWS.

Namecheap does free ID protect for domains.

PayPal offers a good micro transaction fee rate if you plan to do small ($10
or smaller) transactions.

You can use services like Algo or Streisand to set up a relatively secure auto
configured Wireguard VPN.

Nextcloud gives you a HIPPA compliant personal cloud for email, calendar,
chat, etc.

GitLab offers unlimited free private repositories and some basic CI.

~~~
the_resistence
Sheesh I have been struggling with the last few steps of wireguard/algo. Gotta
revisit again

------
TheCoreh
Zeit Now 2.0 has a free serverless tier:
[https://zeit.co/now](https://zeit.co/now)

MongoDB Atlas has a free cloud database tier:
[https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas](https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas)

~~~
Hortinstein
I have been running a small scoreboard on Zeit's free tier for almost 3 years
now...I set it and forget it, only use it once per year and for a while i
couldn't even figure out why it was still working or where it was hosted. Love
Zeit!

------
imafish
My entire app is “serverless” and I host it on AWS and netlify using the free
tier. So far I have been able to keep resource use below the free tier
thresholds.

~~~
phmagic
I'd like to second this. The amount of free compute available to serverless
infrastructure is insane! Serverless does have a learning curve but it's worth
it to learn.

The next best is Heroku's free tier.

~~~
aetimmes
I feel like Heroku got left behind in the current k8s craze but they're still
a good choice for a lot of use-cases, cheap MVPs being one of them.

~~~
cpursley
Heroku is still significantly easier to use than Docker/K8s.

~~~
futureastronaut
That depends on your mental model. The isolation and reproducibility of Docker
is much easier for me than dealing with build pack nonsesne.

~~~
sandis
You can deploy Docker images to Heroku.
[https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/deploying-with-
docke...](https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/deploying-with-docker)

------
discordance
Awesome list for Free for Dev resources:

[https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev#major-cloud-
provid...](https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev#major-cloud-providers)

------
tootie
Google Firebase has a very rich set of features and almost everything is
included (but very rate-limited) in their free tier and a flat $25/mo gets you
quite a bit further. On the downside, it's very much a PaaS solution so lock-
in is a big concern.

[https://firebase.google.com/pricing](https://firebase.google.com/pricing)

------
butteroverflow
GCP used to give an additional $200 credit if you register through the GitLab
referral, with the total of $500. I don't know if it still working.

[https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/google-cloud-
platform/](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/google-cloud-platform/)

------
segmondy
your own computer.

~~~
gameswithgo
I understand why some are downvoting this but, with consumer internet
connections being 1000up/down and a threadripper giving you like 100 cores for
a few bucks, this can be a very handy solution, with quicker deploys and
easier management.

security might be too much of a concern for some applications

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
> with consumer internet connections being 1000up/down

Step out of your Silicon Valley bubble and recognize that this doesn't apply
to everyone.

I only have 30 megabit up/down with Frontier. I can get faster, but it gets
expensive quick, and I don't need more than 30 mbps, even as a gamer. Xfinity
only offers 150 megabit down in my neighborhood, with a puny 15 megabit up,
and for twice the price.

And as others have mentioned, it creates a single point of failure and if you
get hacked, your entire home network is compromised. The last thing you want
to have happen is for some unsavory type to decide they don't like you or your
services and DDoS your home internet connection. I've had it happen to me and
it's not fun.

~~~
FpUser
"Step out of your Silicon Valley bubble" ... I have Business Fiber Internet
package from Bell in my house in Toronto. Residential area far from city core
with an old houses, definitely not a Silicon Valley. 1000 up and down. It
costs me $80 Canadian pesos. Not bad.

~~~
user-
Im in the same boat as you (350/350 for $35 tho) but we are outliers even in
the Canadian market. Fast internet is just now getting to everyone at
affordable prices, even though ive personally had gigabit for 4 years.

------
Blackstone4
If you setup a domain and a c-corp/limited company, you can apply for $1,000
of AWS credits under the AWS Activate scheme. Careful tho because if you get
the $1k, you won't be eligible for further AWS credits under an incubator
worth $100k+

[https://aws.amazon.com/activate/](https://aws.amazon.com/activate/)

Not sure if they still offer the $1k credits for startups outside of
incubators. Here's a thread where someone else got some credits.

[https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/i-just-earned-1-000-in-
aw...](https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/i-just-earned-1-000-in-aws-credits-
through-aws-activate-c001da4a91)

------
znpy
You can run a decent amount of stuff off OVH/Hetzner/Online.net dedicated
server with monthly rental price under $100/mo.

At OVH you can have a Intel Xeon D-1540 (8 c / 16 t - 2 GHz / 2.6 GHz) with
64GB ram for like 90 Euros/month + VAT (US link:
[https://us.ovhcloud.com/products/servers/infrastructure-
serv...](https://us.ovhcloud.com/products/servers/infrastructure-servers))

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
OP is asking for free tier stuff and you respond with servers that start at
$69/month?

------
Elof
StackPath has a startup program [[https://www.stackpath.com/resources/propel-
startup-program/](https://www.stackpath.com/resources/propel-startup-
program/)] and a sandbox for testing out serverless scripts
[[https://sandbox.edgeengine.io/](https://sandbox.edgeengine.io/)]

------
Benjamin_Dobell
As others have mentioned, Linode is great value. Pair it with Dokku and you've
got an even cheaper / more customizable (but _not_ scalable) Heroku.

However, be weary of Linode's "backup" service if you intend to store a lot of
files (as opposed to lots of data / large files). It's file-based (not block-
based) backup, and I can confirm it _does_ fail. In our case, we weren't
storing _tiny_ files either, they were images uploaded to our infrastructure.
Granted, don't do that(!), use S3.

Also, regarding AWS/S3, there's a plethora of ways to get into AWS's Activate
program ([https://aws.amazon.com/activate/](https://aws.amazon.com/activate/))
which includes a decent chunk of free credits.

~~~
0815test
> However, be weary of Linode's "backup" service if you intend to store a lot
> of files...

Huh? Wouldn't it be a lot better to be _wary_ of that service, thus lowering
the risk that you'll be _weary_ of it at some point?

~~~
Benjamin_Dobell
Sorry, I was weary when I wrote 'weary', whilst I meant to write 'wary'. I'll
be more wary of being weary next time.

------
vmurthy
This might come in handy a bit later for you but we were having headaches with
the ramp-up pricing of JIRA+Confluence. We explored open source alternatives
and found OpenProject to be a great product. Free of charge of-course. Once
you get some of the free/cheap VMs mentioned by other posters, feel free to
checkout OpenProject.
[https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00T6OCWRU](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00T6OCWRU)
for EC2 . [https://www.openproject.org/](https://www.openproject.org/) for the
main website.

------
taormina
Other people have mentioned GCP/Firebase for the $300 free trial, but I'm
going to specifically mention their startup program:
[https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/](https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/)

I'm hosting my game servers today on $1000 of free credit from this program.
If you have VCs and whatnot, they'll be able to get more credits out of the
same program for you, but this was great as a solo founder.

~~~
xenospn
Same. I got $1300 credit simply for applying.

------
envolt
I don't think Best (or Good) will be Free, after a certain tier (e.g AWS only
gives a t2.micro for a month (750 hours to be specific))

Most of the cloud providers have some kind of startup program, where they
offer free credits to startup.

We (my company) got credit benefit from IBM, it's been a real savior for us.
You can check it out here
[https://developer.ibm.com/startups/](https://developer.ibm.com/startups/)

~~~
eropple
Having some uncomfortably close experience with IBM Cloud very recently, I
would have a hard time recommending it for just about anything.

I'd go to Azure over IBM Cloud, and I have perturbed many electrons about how
frustrating Azure has been.

------
jamieson-becker
At Userify ([https://userify.com](https://userify.com)), we offer a free tier
for SSH key and user management for up to 20 servers free (billing doesn't
begin until 21 servers) with our SaaS offering (versus 10 free for our on-
premise product). Try it out at [https://userify.com](https://userify.com), no
credit card required.

------
jonas_kgomo
Quite important question. Indiehackers might be a good place to ask as well. I
got introduced to this open-source tool Hasura. It gives you free service for
back-end and handles a lot of issues about scalability. Please DM for more
details [https://hasura.io/](https://hasura.io/)

------
kriss9
You could always use www.evolute.io with free credits and simply shift between
the free usage tiers, across platforms. If you develop your software in a
“serverless” fashion, you might even find a way to be “free” for the
foreseeable future.

------
telcal
Azure has 25+ "always free" services besides the $200 free credit.

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/free/?v=17.39a](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/?v=17.39a)

------
IanCal
What do you need to run? Many live systems can run on pretty cheap hardware.

------
ignaloidas
I see a lot of linode recomendations here, but if you are looking at mostly
European audience scaleway.net has very cheap VMs starting at 2€ per month,
while not being that much slower than linode

~~~
WhiteOwlLion
online.net is the sister company of scaleway. scaleway has some ARM bare metal
which is cheap but sometimes you see issues if you try to run software only
optimized for x86.

kimsufi has 3.99 euro/mo baremetal server but very hard to get (have to keep
trying).

hetzner cloud has cheap vps and also has auctions for servers. I got some i7
8core 16GB RAM & 1-4TB HDD for 22 euro/mo. They are closer to 30 euro/mo but
likely your best bet for budget dedicated with better specs.

i have a few other dedicated servers (old Xeon) running off a bulgarian
service provider

~~~
ignaloidas
ARM servers at scaleway actually start at 3euro/mo. I find that others have a
bit more difficult setup the server. Finding the best auctions isn't the best
way to spend your time in a startup. You are better of doing something that
improves the quality of your product, and until some point, the server
quality/price isn't your concern at all.

------
sdorosz
Hi, if your business is data driven based on a cloud datawarehouse you can
check out repods.io - there you can start out with a full functioning pod for
free without expiration

------
CSDude
dedicated hetzner

~~~
xenator
And Cloud Hetzner, starting from 3 euros

------
DonHopkins
Don't try this at $HOME, but I have a friend who ran an early "cloud
computing" start-up company in the 80's called "Computer Time Share
Corporation", that actually sold time on another company's computers! We
affectionately referred to them as "Computer Crime Share Corporation".

------
onesmallcoin
buy a .edu email, use google compute till you have an MVP to sell

~~~
wtmt
How do you “buy” a .edu email (without signing up for a long and expensive
course or college)? I’ve seen some hacks online to get one for free, but not
sure if they work.

------
anonymousDan
Anything for free GPUS?

------
dillonmckay
zoho.com for email hosting.

------
DenisM
Bizspark

~~~
jabart
Bizspark changed and is no longer available. I was in the last round when they
shut down early.

~~~
DenisM
They still seem to have something going:

    
    
      Available for qualified Startups
    
      Technical enablement
      Microsoft technology to help your bottom line:
    
      Up to $120k of free Azure cloud for two years
      Visual Studio Enterprise cloud subscription
      Office 365 Business Premium
      Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement and Talent
      Enterprise grade Azure support
    

[https://startups.microsoft.com/en-
us/benefits/](https://startups.microsoft.com/en-us/benefits/)

~~~
GFischer
I think you have to be introduced into the program by an accelerator now.

I´ll miss it, it was a pretty awesome program.

~~~
trazire
I believe you can email your pitch deck in and get a code to apply.

~~~
GFischer
That´s very interesting to hear. Thank you.

------
spraveenitpro
Your own laptop.

------
quickthrower2
I started this list
[https://gist.github.com/mcapodici/25d225848eda987071a0263b31...](https://gist.github.com/mcapodici/25d225848eda987071a0263b31491ba6)
\- I keep meaning to keep it up to date.

~~~
quickthrower2
What netiquette have I broken here?

~~~
corobo
Best guess you said it's not been updated and on visiting it doesn't have many
services listed, all of which have already been referred to in the comments
elsewhere

------
smilesnd
First you leverage already existing blockchain technology to create simple
program that allows you to access gpu, cpu, network, and storage of a pc it is
installed on. Second you adverties it to people telling them they can earn
cryptocash you have invented in exchange for resources used on there pc. Third
any surplus of access you have sell to a third party or mine a more popular
cryptocurrency.

