Burning your money with Cloud

Its the pleasent summer of June 2023, my production app with 3 users (two are my mails itselfØ) was running for free of cost on railway when I suddenly get a mail from them saying that they are shutting down their starter plan... Railway, the Heroku Alternative, Shuts Down Their Free Tier.

After heroku it was time to say goodbye to railway...

Railway founded in 2019, offered easy deployments for your applications and provided a viable alternative to Heroku. It quickly gained popularity among developers due to its simplicity and powerful features. However, the recent shutdown of the starter plan came as a shock to many users who relied on Railway for their projects.

The starter plan of Railway had been a go-to choice for developers who wanted to deploy their applications without any cost. It allowed users to host small-scale projects, experiment with new ideas, and learn the ropes of deployment without incurring any expenses. The sudden discontinuation of this plan left many developers searching for alternatives and contemplating their next steps.

Now what was the next choice??? AWS 🗿

If you have endless money than AWS might be the solution... but that case doesnt holds for me...

Finding alternatives

There are also other alternatives to Railway like Render and Fly.io. But the cold starts in Render turns out to be a deal breaker for me... When its comes to Fly.io all plans require a credit card to be added, also it doesnt actually provides free tier instead it provides some free resources... The starting plan for a dedicated VM is $29/mo...

AWS cult

AWS now comes into the picture... I could spin up an EC2 instance and deploy my app there... The billing would be done at the end of the month based on the usage... But the AWS cult is not for me... AWS had been a nightmare for most of the developers. The pricing is very complex and the documentation is not very helpful. The UI is also very confusing and it is difficult to find what you are looking for. For a small project/individual developer AWS is not a good choice.

SO WHATS THE SOLUTION???

Run up my own home server!!! Yeah literally running a server at your basement 💀 Then use cloudflare to protect yourself from DDOS attacks. But there are lots of issues with this approach. Power cuts and internet outages turns out to be barrier to this but who cares