Question: Where can I run a WebSocket server for free (hobby project)? Heroku is limited (doesn’t run the whole month and will soon kill free plans). Alternatives?

Fly.io?

Never heard of it. Looks like there’s a free tier that could work. Love the illustrations!

(Fly and Render are the two services everyone mentions immediately after lamenting the slow death of Heroku)

Pretty much every major cloud provider has a free tier, as well as many of the developer focussed tools like cloudflare and netlify. In other words, you have lots of choices

Unfortunately, Netlify and Vercel don’t support WebSockets.

I don't use them, I only use the big 3, primarily GCP for it's superior DX

I tried AWS, but found it very confusing and was quite shocked how bad it was – given it’s so popular and used in many major products. Also ended up paying for stuff that wasn’t running, just because I enabled a load balancer. Google Cloud Platform looks cleaner for sure 🙂

Load balancers typically cost money because you need a public IP for them, which is what they are actually charging the flat rate for.

Yes, it’s very confusing!