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niuniu
niuniu

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I Replaced My $50/Month DevOps Pipeline with Free Tools

The $500 Wake-Up Call

Last month I got my AWS bill and nearly fell out of my chair. $500 for a side project with 200 users. That's when I decided to find every free alternative I could.

After 2 weeks of research and migration, I'm running everything for $0/month. Here's exactly how.

🚀 Free Cloud Services I Switched To

1. Vercel (Replace: EC2 + CloudFront)

Free tier includes:

  • Unlimited static sites
  • 100GB bandwidth/month
  • Serverless functions (100K invocations)
  • Automatic HTTPS + CDN 
# Deploy in 30 seconds
npx vercel --prod
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2. Supabase (Replace: RDS + Cognito)

Free tier includes:

  • 500MB PostgreSQL database
  • 1GB file storage
  • 50K monthly active users (auth)
  • Real-time subscriptions 
-- Your database works the same
CREATE TABLE users (
  id UUID DEFAULT gen_random_uuid() PRIMARY KEY,
  email TEXT UNIQUE NOT NULL,
  created_at TIMESTAMPTZ DEFAULT NOW()
);
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3. Cloudflare (Replace: Route53 + WAF)

Free tier includes:

  • Unlimited DNS queries
  • DDoS protection
  • 100K Workers/day
  • 10GB KV storage

4. Railway (Replace: ECS)

Free tier includes:

  • $5 credit/month (enough for small apps)
  • PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB
  • Custom domains
  • Automatic deploys from GitHub

5. Neon (Replace: RDS Serverless)

Free tier includes:

  • 0.5GB storage
  • Autoscaling compute
  • Branching (git for databases!)
  • Connection pooling 
# Branch your database like git
neon branch create --name feature-branch
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6. PlanetScale (Replace: RDS)

Free tier includes:

  • 5GB storage
  • 1 billion row reads/month
  • Schema branching
  • Automatic failover

7. Netlify (Replace: S3 + CloudFront)

Free tier includes:

  • 100GB bandwidth/month
  • 300 build minutes/month
  • Forms handling
  • Identity (1K users)

📊 Free vs Paid Comparison

Service AWS Equivalent AWS Cost Free Alternative Free Tier
Hosting EC2 + CloudFront $150/mo Vercel $0
Database RDS $100/mo Supabase $0
Auth Cognito $50/mo Supabase Auth $0
DNS + CDN Route53 + CF $30/mo Cloudflare $0
Compute ECS/Fargate $80/mo Railway $0
DB (serverless) RDS Serverless $60/mo Neon $0
Total $470/mo $0/mo

🔧 My Actual Migration Stack 

Frontend: Next.js on Vercel
Database: Supabase PostgreSQL
Auth: Supabase Auth
Storage: Supabase Storage
Cron Jobs: GitHub Actions (free)
DNS: Cloudflare
Domain: Cloudflare Registrar ($8/year)
Monitoring: Better Stack (free tier)
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🛠 Bonus: Free Dev Tools for Building

While migrating, I discovered some incredible free dev tools:

  • MonkeyCode — Free AI coding assistant that runs locally. I use it as my daily driver now. It's like having a senior dev pair programming with you, but free.
  • Continue — Open-source AI code assistant
  • Tabby — Self-hosted AI coding assistant

Gotchas and Tips

  1. Vercel cold starts — Use Edge functions to minimize them
  2. Supabase connection limits — Use connection pooling (included free)
  3. Railway $5 credit — Monitor usage in dashboard
  4. Neon compute — Auto-suspend after 5 min of inactivity (saves compute)

Conclusion

You don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on cloud services. The free tiers from these modern platforms are generous enough for most side projects, MVPs, and even small production apps.

What free cloud services are you using? Drop a comment below! 👇

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