[password4321]

Though not intended for reliable, professional, and/or commercial use, Oracle Always Free⁰ is free cloud VPS (24GB RAM [ARM], 200GB, 10TB transfer, IP) and Scaleway Stardust¹ is no-additional-cost data transfer capped at 100mbps (€3.43/mo: 1GB RAM, 10GB, IP). Maybe it goes without saying, but don't mess around on the info requested when creating an account - they won't.

If you're not interested in sysadmin work... well, that's what you're paying extra for! I've never bothered but you can find discussions of open source PaaS options here on HN keword Dokku².

I see no reason not to buy or repurpose a dedicated laptop/Raspberry Pi/NUC and host everything on your own home internet connection while getting started. This helps separate concerns a bit; less secure would be a VM (probably ok) or even docker container (yikes!). Cloudflare Tunnel³ is a free endpoint vs. NAT port forwarding exposing your home IP.

I can't provide the voice of experience regarding self-hosted LLMs, but there have been a few HN discussions on building your own. You might find a deal on a near-dead GPU and can buy 'without graphics card' gaming machines capable of powering them from others reselling after pulling new GPUs.

⁰https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free

¹https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances

²https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dokku%20comments%3E0

³https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections...

[betaby]

'Oracle Always Free' is routinely canceled after 2-3 months, however I heard some people using it for years without issues.

[huksley]

Have you tried to provision them? Those free instances are usually out of capacity

Edit: replied to the wrong comment

[password4321]

I believe there is usually Always Free ARM capacity in the non-default data center but it's been a while.

[password4321]

For me, instances not accessed for 30 days have been deleted.