[euank]

Both AWS free and GCE require a credit card before doing anything at all, so that's not a barrier.

As for the actual price... GCE's cost of .013c / hour is so tiny that I don't see how you can say it's a "huge deal".

You can spin up a GCE for 5 hours a day for a week to experiment and it'll cost you less than 50 cents. It's not quite free, but it basically is. As long as you're just playing around, always-on shouldn't matter so you can spin the server up to play, down when you're done, and thus pay almost nothing.