[Willamin]

There are ways to actually run your application for free using the big players' free services. One route I've looked at for e-commerce is storing product data on Stripe, hosting product pages with Netlify, pulling product data during static site build, triggering a build when Stripe data gets updated, and using Netlify's wrapper around AWS Lambda for free FaaS (AWS Lambda can be free forever, but you also need AWS API Gateway which isn't free forever). This results in the only fee being a CC fee.

I've put together a demo over at libra-shop.org. It definitely still needs some work, but I think most of the important bits are all sorted out.

Of course, the biggest issue with using free tiers for your entire stack is that you have no guarantee that the services will be running forever. (eg. Netlify could stop providing a free AWS Lambda connection)

[copperx]

All of this work and complete dependency on third party services is worth it? Isn't much easier to create a lightweight app in say, Go and SQLite, and pay a so-low-to-be-insignificant monthly fee?

[Roritharr]

I wonder what amount of money would be sufficient to create the digital equivalent of a foundation to ensure the uptime of a website/project. It would be kinda cool to put away a few grand to ensure something stays up "forever".

[throwawayjava]

The price of forever ranges from a few hundred to millions depending on how resilient you want to be.

In reality, it would probably be more effective to dedicate nearly $0 to infrastructure and $N,000.00 to an endowment for 1-3 hours of engineering time each year.

Figuring out how to host a static site for free and moving the site to that service requires almost no time for a competent engineer. But finding a solution that is guaranteed to exist in 100 years with zero human intervention would probably cost millions...

[Roritharr]

That's along the lines of what I was thinking. The www.mywebsite.com foundation, worth a whopping 10k, invests it's 300$ annual interest in updating the hosting for www.mywebsite.com.

[exikyut]

Well, Network Solutions seems(?) to offer 100-year domain registration for $1k ($999).

Thinking about it, a holistic solution to this kind of problem would [categorically need to] be extremely expensive in order to ratelimit demand. Because it's not just "host this for me for a while" with an implicit sort of "maybe let it fall over one day and see if I yell at you" - that 2nd bit is completely removed, and the expectation is 100.0% (amortized, aggregate) uptime... indefinitely.

It's interesting how not even graves last forever. They decay over time (hundreds of years). Not all are maintained.

What sort of "forever" are you talking about? "Most Important Thing™ when the paperclip maximisers take over"?

[Cthulhu_]

Would just having a pre-paid credit card work? I guess not, also given how every once in a while you may need to accept new terms and conditions.

[suff]

I agree. There is a diminishing return on service reliability as you approach 'free', and at some point, you finally pay $9.78/mo and survive anyway.

[Willamin]

For most businesses, probably not. I have a few friends that have Etsy shops as hobbies. They don't consistently make enough money from it to justify paying for a Shopify, etc site. So I figured I'd see if I could manage to get the costs down to only a credit card transaction fee.

[TotempaaltJ]

Netlify free tier is magical. It's allowed me to stop spending on hosting altogether. My blog, personal website, and all other sites I own are static, so I don't have to pay for my droplet anymore.

[dragonwriter]

> Of course, the biggest issue with using free tiers for your entire stack is that you have no guarantee that the services will be running forever.

That's not guaranteed for paid tiers either; no product offering, free or paid, is guaranteed to be offered forever.