I want one small always-on box for a side project — a tiny API, a database, maybe 2GB of files — and I have been burned once already by a plan that quietly turned into a bill in month thirteen. I don't mind paying eventually, I mind waking up to a charge I didn't schedule. Which providers have genuinely perpetual free resources, and what's the catch on each?
Adding the one that isn't a VM at all, since your workload is small: object storage plus edge functions. Cloudflare's R2 free allowance is 10GB-month of standard storage, a million class A operations and ten million class B operations a month, and egress is free — which is the part that makes it different from the usual object storage bill.
For 2GB of files and a small API you may not need a box at all. Fewer things to patch, nothing to be reclaimed for idling, and no operating system birthday to remember.
Google's split is the one people misread, so, precisely: the $300 credit is a 90-day trial, and the Always Free tier is separate and permanent.
Always Free for compute is one non-preemptible e2-micro per month, and only in us-west1, us-central1 or us-east1 — pick any other region and you're paying from minute one. It includes 30GB-months of standard persistent disk and 1GB of outbound transfer from North America per month.
So it exists, it's real, and it's small and geographically fixed. Fine for a tiny API. Not fine if you needed it in Europe.
I lost an always-free Arm instance to the idle reclamation rule and it was entirely my own fault — it was a hobby bot that did roughly nothing for a week at a time.
Fix was boring: a small scheduled job that does real work every few hours, plus taking a backup of the boot volume once a month so a reclaim costs me twenty minutes instead of a weekend. If you take one of these, assume it can vanish and make that survivable.
Politely disagreeing with the framing that perpetual free means no bill. Every one of these has a paid edge you can walk over without noticing — egress above the included amount, a second static IP, snapshots, logs retention, a managed database you added "just to try."
The thing that actually protects you isn't picking the right tier, it's a hard budget alert on day one and a card with a low limit if the provider allows it. I've had a $0.40 bill and a $190 bill from the same always-free account in different months, and the difference was a backup schedule I forgot about.
Load balancers, static IPs and NAT gateways. That trio is responsible for most "but it was supposed to be free" posts I've read, on every provider.
This is the bit I keep relearning. The month-thirteen surprise last time was actually a load balancer I'd left attached, not the instance itself.
Perpetual: Oracle Always Free, Google's Always Free tier, and the edge platforms' free allowances. Time-limited: trial credits, anything labelled twelve months, anything described as an introductory plan. Set the budget alert regardless of which you pick.
@r2_bucketeer · 2mo ago · 3 replies
Oracle's Always Free is the most generous of the perpetual ones and it genuinely doesn't expire — their docs say the always-free resources stay free for the life of the account, whether or not the trial credits ran out.
What you get: up to two of the tiny AMD micro instances (an eighth of an OCPU and 1GB memory each), plus Arm-based Ampere capacity totalling 2 OCPUs and 12GB memory, plus 200GB of block storage in your home region. The Arm allocation is the useful one — you can put it all in a single instance.
The catch is written down and people still get caught by it: idle instances can be reclaimed if CPU, network and memory all sit under 20% for seven days. A genuinely quiet side project can be considered idle.
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@crashloop_cara · 2mo ago
It caught me. Keep a boot volume backup and treat the instance as disposable and it becomes an annoyance rather than a loss.
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@cold_storage_kim · 2mo ago
The reclamation rule is exactly the kind of thing that's in the docs and never in the blog posts recommending it. A quiet hobby API is precisely what would get caught.
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