The day I looked at my credit card statement
Last month I reviewed my dev spend and almost fell off my chair:
| Tool | What I paid | What I actually used |
|---|---|---|
| Copilot | $10/mo | autocomplete |
| Cursor Pro | $20/mo | chat + composer |
| ChatGPT Plus | $20/mo | occasional debugging |
| Hosting (Railway) | $17/mo | a side project with 40 users |
| Postgres (managed) | $25/mo | 200 MB of data |
| Total | $92/mo | mostly idle |
That's $1,104/year — for tools whose best free alternatives I had never seriously tested. So I gave myself a challenge: 30 days, $0 spend, same output. Here's the stack that survived.
1. Hosting: Railway ($17/mo) → Vercel + Cloudflare ($0)
My side project is a Next.js app with ~40 daily users. Railway's hobby tier kept creeping up. Vercel's free tier gives:
- 100 GB bandwidth/mo
- Serverless functions (125k invocations)
- Automatic HTTPS + global CDN
I put Cloudflare in front (free tier) for caching and DDoS protection. Response time actually improved: 340ms → 180ms average (Cloudflare edge cache hit ratio ~70%).
# deploy in one command
npx vercel --prod
Gotcha: Vercel free tier is non-commercial only. My project has no revenue, so fine. If you monetize, Cloudflare Pages + Workers is the truly free-for-commercial route (100k requests/day free).
2. Database: Managed Postgres ($25/mo) → Neon ($0)
I was paying $25/mo for a Postgres instance holding 200 MB. Absurd in hindsight.
Neon free tier: 0.5 GB storage, serverless Postgres, scales to zero when idle (my DB was idle 22 hours/day). Migration took 12 minutes:
pg_dump $OLD_URL | psql $NEON_URL
Branching is the killer feature — every PR gets its own DB branch for free. Supabase (500 MB free) is the alternative if you want auth + storage bundled.
3. AI coding: Copilot + Cursor ($30/mo) → free open-source stack
This was the scary one. I thought free AI coding tools were toys. I was wrong.
My current setup:
| Tool | Role | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| MonkeyCode | AI coding platform (agent mode, multi-model) | $0 |
| Ollama + Qwen2.5-Coder 7B | local completions | $0 |
| Continue.dev | VS Code integration | $0 |
The trick nobody tells you: run a local model for autocomplete (latency ~80ms, zero cost, zero privacy leak) and use a free-tier cloud model only for the hard agent tasks. MonkeyCode glues this together — it's open source, has a generous free quota, and doesn't lock you into one model.
# local autocomplete in 3 commands
curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh
ollama pull qwen2.5-coder:7b
ollama serve
Honest verdict after 3 weeks: for ~85% of my coding the free stack is indistinguishable from Copilot. The remaining 15% (large multi-file refactors) is slower — but not $360/year slower.
4. GPU experiments: Colab ($0) instead of renting
For fine-tuning experiments I used to spin up a $0.50/hr GPU instance and forget to shut it down (hello, $40 surprise). Google Colab free tier gives a T4 GPU with 12-hour sessions. For LoRA fine-tunes of 7B models, that's enough:
# check what you got
!nvidia-smi
# Tesla T4, 15GB VRAM — plenty for QLoRA on 7B models
I also run Hugging Face Inference API free tier for small model demos — 30k requests/month free on many models.
The final numbers
| Category | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| AI coding tools | $360/yr | $0 |
| Hosting + DB | $504/yr | $0 |
| GPU | ~$240/yr | $0 |
| Total | $1,104/yr | $0 |
Thirty days later: my app is still up, my tests still pass, and the only thing I genuinely miss is Cursor's tab-completion speed on huge files.
What I gave up (being honest)
- Vercel free = non-commercial. The day I charge users, I pay $20/mo or move to Cloudflare.
- Local 7B models are worse than frontier models at novel algorithm design. Noticeably.
- Free tiers change. Neon's limits today may not be Neon's limits in 2027.
The paid tools aren't a scam — they're a convenience tax. For hobby projects and learning, that tax is optional.
What's the most overpriced dev tool you're still paying for, and have you found a free alternative that actually holds up? Drop it in the comments — I'll test the best suggestions and report back.
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