Stringing together several free tiers to host an application with zero cost

I love free hosting and I really like this setup shown. I've written about some available free options before at https://www.doodles.dev/2022/05/27/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-....

The big problem is that free plans change, requirements change and this leads to a lot more maintenance sometimes, honestly I think I should just get a DO droplet and done with it already.

One of the big examples recently is Heroku removing their free plans entirely, which is a bummer honestly, hopefully we see fly and render get feature parity and the DX we used to get with Heroku. Dockerfiles have recently gotten me to really consider PaaS for more important deployments since the dockerfiles remove basically any worry you can have about vendor lock-in. (except for the DB, as always)

The problem with free tiers is they can disappear any moment...great setup anyways, and guide.