I Spent $0.99 on a VPS and Honestly? It Works.

I've been running side projects on the internet for about six years now. In that time I've paid for shared hosting, a few droplets, a couple of hetzner boxes, and one time I rented a dedicated server for something that absolutely did not need a dedicated server. You know how it goes.
A few months ago I needed something small — just a place to run a lightweight Python script that checks a price API every 15 minutes and pings me when something changes. Nothing fancy. The script uses maybe 20MB of RAM when it's running. I did not need a $6/mo DigitalOcean droplet for this. I especially did not need the "recommended" $12/mo plan with 2GB RAM and backups enabled.
I found NATBox while scrolling through some forum thread. Someone mentioned they'd been using it for bots and small automation jobs. The pricing page said $0.99/mo for 256MB RAM, 3GB SSD, and — this part caught my eye — 20 dedicated ports.
I thought: okay, this is probably some sketchy thing running on someone's gaming PC. Let me try it anyway.
What actually happens when you order
The ordering process is manual, which sounds alarming but in practice is fine. You fill out a form, they send you a PayPal or crypto payment link within an hour or two, and once you pay, they provision your container and email you an SSH command. No control panel. No wizard. Just:
ssh root@147.135.215.238 -p [your_port]
And that's it. You're in. Full root. Real Linux.
The ports thing
This is actually the clever part. NATBox runs LXC containers behind a shared IP, so instead of giving you a dedicated public IP, they give you 20 dedicated ports on their host. Port 1 is your SSH. Ports 2-20 forward into your container.
For my use case — a script that doesn't need any inbound connections — this doesn't matter at all. But if you're running a web server, a bot, a game server, a proxy, whatever: you just bind to the port inside your container and it's reachable from the outside world at that port on the host IP. It works.
One month in
The script runs. It has not gone down. I paid $0.99. I have genuinely nothing to complain about.
Would I run a production app with real users here? Probably not — not because of reliability concerns, but because you'd want a dedicated IP, more RAM headroom, and the ability to scale. But for bots, scrapers, learning projects, dev environments, or just having a Linux shell in the cloud? NATBox is legitimately good.
The fact that it exists at $0.99 is kind of wild. I keep expecting to find the catch. So far there isn't one.
Find it at: natbox.io — Nano plan, $0.99/mo