Every few months, someone asks me how I run my entire online presence for basically nothing. The short answer is: I don't pay for what I can get for free.
The long answer is this post.
My entire infrastructure this site, APIs, email, monitoring, URL shortener, dev tools runs on free-tier cloud services. Total cost: $0/month. That's less than a single AWS load balancer costs for an hour.
Here's exactly how it works, why I chose each piece, and what I'd do differently.
The Philosophy: Free Tier First
