Most "best deals" lists are affiliate rankings. This one is about the free tiers and pricing structures that actually change what a side project costs to run, and where each one stops being free.
Cloudflare Pages serves unlimited static requests and unlimited bandwidth on its free plan, with the limits placed on builds (a cap on builds per month) and on file count and size per deployment rather than traffic. For a hand-built HTML site that means a traffic spike costs nothing, which is not true of metered hosts. Netlify and Vercel free tiers are generous but bandwidth-metered, and the jump to the paid plan happens at exactly the moment a post does well. If your site is static, put it somewhere unmetered and stop thinking about it.
The same 2 vCPU / 4 GB virtual machine costs wildly different amounts depending on where you rent it. Hetzner's shared-vCPU cloud instances start in the low single-digit euros per month; DigitalOcean, Linode and Vultr cluster around $6 for the smallest droplet and roughly $24 at the 4 GB tier; the equivalent AWS instance costs more once you add EBS and egress. Egress is the real difference — the budget hosts include several terabytes, while the hyperscalers bill per gigabyte after a small allowance. For a hobby project, that single line item can be larger than the server.
JetBrains discounts the All Products Pack in year two and again in year three, and offers free licences for students and open-source maintainers, so the sticker price is rarely what a long-term user pays. Many SaaS tools price annual billing around 20% below monthly — worth taking only once you have used the tool for three months. Open-source maintainer programmes at several vendors give full-tier accounts free; if you maintain anything with real users, applying takes ten minutes.
Lifetime deals on infrastructure are a bet that the vendor survives and does not re-tier you; the failure rate in that category is high. Heavily discounted first-year cloud credits reliably create a bill shock in month thirteen — if you take them, set a budget alert at the real post-credit price on day one. And any tool billed per seat that you adopt for one person will get expensive the moment the team grows, so check the second-seat price before you standardise on it.
Static site on Cloudflare Pages, images and downloads in R2, one small Hetzner box for anything that needs a server, Postgres on a managed free tier until it outgrows it, Tailscale for admin access instead of exposing SSH, and free-tier uptime monitoring pointed at the public URL. Realistic running cost for a small production site: under €10 a month, most of it the server.