No, this isn't me trying to shill you an online course on how to start your business.
In fact, I am doing the opposite here! I am writing a little list of the free technology (and some slightly paid) that I use to run my tech stack.
This is somewhat of an extension of my previous blog post
Bradley Stannard
Where I talked about what it takes to run breadNET, how much it costs etc.
I've since been able to cut my costs down a fair bit, and as the country I reside in is in the middle of a governmental failure as well as a Cost of living crisis.
Politics aside, lets look at the tech I have found
It's broken down in to 2 parts:
- Pretty much free
- Somewhat expensive
Pretty much free is services that cost under $15 a year totally, provided you are happy with their free services.
Somewhat expensive is the services that have a monthly billing cycle, and can get pretty expensive if not done well.
As the list goes down, it moves from hosting your domain, to code, cicd, storing artifacts and finally hosting a website.
Pretty much free
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is a CDN, DNS service and recently a domain registrar.
As with all of these services, you can pay, but I have been using it for YEARS with no worries.
The nice thing about Cloudflare is if you buy your domain through them, they deal with the DNS for you automatically.
If you didn't purchase it through them you can transfer it to them, and you will see a huge reduction in cost.
My domain used to cost £13 a year, and now has gone to $9 a year.
Cloudflare charge you what they get charged, their business model isn't selling domains, it's building a CDN network and everything around it.
Below is a list of services they offer
- Domain Registration
- DNS management
- Zero Trust
- CDN
Github
At a high level, GitHub is a website and cloud-based service that helps developers store and manage their code, as well as track and control changes to their code.
Github is pretty much free, unless you're an absolute code machine and want to flex on your friends, there is no need to hand over payment.
You can create unlimited repositories, have access to 2000 CI/CD minutes a month (that's like an entire day of the job running btw)
Below is a list of services they offer:
- Unlimited public/private repositories
- Automatic security and version updates
- 500MB of Packages storage
- Creating Organizations and then, unlimited repos
Codefresh
Codefresh is my chosen CI/CD provider because it's simple to use, each step is simply a docker image, and it's fast.
Codefresh's free tier is very generous and allows 1000 cloud credits (what ever that means)
It allows you to pretty much make as many pipelines as you wish, with as many steps as you want.
I use it for building docker images, running terraform and deploying documentation sites... and hopefully in the future this site will be built too.
Below is a list of services they offer:
- CI/CD Pipelines
- Private Helm store
- Private Docker repo
- Full stack testing (they call this composition)
Docker Hub
Moving on from Codefresh, where we build the images, we now need a place to store them.
Docker Hub is pretty much the go to for the average Joe who doesn't have a corporate credit card and unlimited money to use the likes of Google artifact registry.
Just to clear it up, Docker is the software that uses OCI compliant images, and Docker Inc is the company that made it.
Docker Hub is where we can store the images we build either Locally, or on Codefresh.
Docker hub allows 2 free Private registries (no one can see them unless invited to) and then unlimited public images (Example)
Below is a list of services they offer:
- Docker image storage
Fly.io
I recently posted about this company on it's own.
Fly is awesome if you ask me. They take docker images, host them on either Nomad or turn them in to a Micro-vm using Firecracker.
For free you can run 3 applications anywhere in the world.
I make heavy use of this, like I mentioned previously I plan to re-write this site to be hosted on fly, further reducing my costs.
I host my documentation site on Fly and have had 0 down time since
Below is a list of services they offer:
- Hosted Docker (Requires some fiddling)
- Hosted Applications
- SQL Hosting
- 3 free applications or
- 2 free applications and a builder
- Free URL
- Free SSL Certificates
Somewhat expensive
This section focuses on platforms that you have to pay to use.
Note, that Digital Ocean is a referral link. You get $200 in credit over 60 days, I get a little kickback once you spend $25. You are welcome to not use it, but it helps me bring this content to you <3
Digital Ocean
Digital ocean is one of the smaller cloud providers, they have a different target audience then the next mentioned Google cloud.
I've been using Digital Ocean for around 4 years now, and never had any issues.
They offer everything from Kubernetes to S3 compliant storage.
You can purchase a droplet from them starting at $4 a month, which is more than enough to run a static site on.
Below is a list of services they offer:
Google Cloud
I know you're reading this thinking... "Eh google isn't free" and you're technically not wrong.
Google actually has a very generous Free tier
This has offerings like free compute instances, Big query (analytics)
If you're planning to use Google clouds free tier, I have some recommendations for you:
-
Decice what your business is and what it's compute needs are
-
Try and use Cloud native systems
- This is basically Docker, use docker
-
Look in to running everything on Serverless
- Cloud Run
- Cloud Functions
-
Try avoid compute as much as you can
-
Look at using other services like Firebase for Mobile applications
Also, shameless self plug, but I am a Google certified cloud architect, so like, hit me up if you need some help!