I host quite a few things, both on Digital Ocean as droplets (their name for a compute instance) and on my Thinkpad for keeping things in my control. The post is for people who find things like these cool and would like to self host and provide apps for free to others.
To summarise, it all costs money and it's not a small amount.
Tiny example, I have a service called Ping and here's what it costs to keep it running
Which is about $204 a year to run and makes me $0. I'm not adding domain charges since it's not specific to the project but costs about $25/year.
Similar to this, let's say you own the server like an old laptop. That adds in electricity charges, and to avoid exposing your IP to the internet, you need something like Cloudflare Tunnels (free), or you can set up a ~$4 droplet that can do it for multiple such self-owned servers.
My current Thinkpad takes about 60W to trickle charge and the current battery power holds up for 4-5 hours, I'll leave the rest of the calculation to you since the cost differs from place to place.
Things like goblin.run, ping, my other micro services (hits,music, etc), all cost about $60/month which is $720 a year.
None of them earn me a single penny. This post is not to brag but to let people know that it's not cheap to run these. There are alternatives to minimize costs, like using Cloudflare / Oracle's free tiers, but they all have their own issues which would further add to my maintenance time and cost.
I could also have a single large VPS for $60 and run it with something like selfprivacy.org, coolify, or /dev/push that would also provide decent centralized logging and observability, which I hardly ever add to the free products. I'm not a fan of tracing and telemetry and would rather spend time writing better simulators to identify the issues than constantly track user actions somewhere (a topic for another day).
Point being, it's fun, but don't think it'll be truly free to run it all by yourself. People seem to think infra is cheap and yes you can use your Vercel / Netlify Free tiers for something small but as soon as the traffic reaches a point where it's important for your service/app to be up you end up with a large bill.
That's all for now, Adios!