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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Deploying a Python AI app for free: a realistic path from laptop to a working URL

#shipping #deployment #freetier

A working demo with a shareable URL is worth far more in a portfolio or a hackathon submission than a project that only runs on your laptop. You don't need a paid server to get there.

A realistic free-tier path

  1. Containerise the app (a simple Dockerfile) so it runs the same locally and on any host.
  2. Deploy the backend to a free-tier platform that supports Python web services — most have a sleep-after-inactivity limit, which is fine for a demo.
  3. Use a managed free-tier database (Postgres or similar) rather than a local file, so state survives a redeploy.
  4. Put secrets in the platform's environment-variable settings, never committed to the repo.

The trade-offs to expect

Free tiers usually cold-start after inactivity — the first request after a while is slow. That's an acceptable trade for zero cost on a student project, but tell reviewers or judges to expect it rather than let them think the app is broken.

See environment variables and config for AI apps for the secrets-handling half of this.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour presenting evaluation criteria — feasibility, innovation, practicality, problem solving — on a projector screen
Walking a room through evaluation criteria

Pranjul Rathour presenting BrandHive on a projector screen
Presenting BrandHive

Pranjul Rathour in a shirt and tie holding a microphone in front of a career-opportunities slide
A career session for students

Pranjul Rathour presenting with a microphone in front of a slide reading 'Now what's the conclusion?'
Presenting to a room

Pranjul Rathour on stage presenting a requirements-gathering and user-flow slide
Requirements gathering, on stage

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-07.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

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