Sketchviz [1] runs almost entirely in free tiers from Cloudflare and AWS:

- Cloudflare to avoid big bandwidth bills from AWS for the wasm-compiled graphviz that is on every page

- AWS Lambda's 1M free requests and 400,000 GB-seconds for expressjs (web serving) and graphviz (rendering hostable .png images)

- API Gateway's 1M free requests for routing HTTP -> AWS Lambda (for the app) or S3 (for hosted PNGs)

- S3's 20K GET requests/mo (for hosted PNGs)

The only one I exceed is S3, but it's dirt cheap.

[1]: https://sketchviz.com/new

Don't know if this qualifies as cool but I built a single purpose site to list IMDb ratings of all episodes of a TV show in a grid, which runs on GitHub Pages. It doesn't use any external APIs.

https://theshowgrid.com

I built it mainly for personal use. I know IMDb ratings aren't perfect but it's a decent measure of mass opinion.

I run a paid Chrome extension (with a free tier!) that audits websites for best practices:

https://www.checkbot.io/

It uses:

- Netlify's free tier for the homepage + Netlify CMS (free) for content editing

- Firebase within the free limits for cloud functions, storage + user authentication

- The free tier of Crisp web chat for support

- The Chrome store which hosts the extension for free ($5 sign up fee)

- Paddle for payments. They take a % of each transaction but they don't have a sign up fee or ongoing fees.

I don’t do anything with the services but hopefully this can inspire:

https://free-for.dev/#/

https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev

I run https://ranked.vote on Netlify’s free tier.

https://notify.run on DynamoDB’s free tier (and originally Lambda’s, but I outgrew that and it became cheaper to use a low-end Digital Ocean box)

https://treeverse.app uses Lambda/S3/Netlify on either free or pennies-per-month tier.

I run a free GCP micro VPS and also a free Oracle Cloud VPS. I find it useful for running very low volume web app experiments and for light coding from portable devices (good Mosh+Emacs+tmux setups possible for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices).

Also, I use Leanpub to write my books [1], which is free to use (and they pay good royalties). A recent hack: I used to supply free downloads for my eBooks on https://markwatson.com (which I run on a free VPS) but then realized that by setting the minimum price for my Leanpub books to $0.00, I didn't even have to do that. About 50 people download a free book for everyone who chooses to pay, so I hope Leanpub is not losing money on me (they are nice people).

[1] https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson

My personal website[1] is hosted free on Github Pages (built with Eleventy).

[1]: https://www.justus.ws/

Since you mentioned Geocities, Neocities [1]

[1] - https://neocities.org/

My commercial project Video Hub App is nearly free: https://videohubapp.com/

It's a Gatsby website and I used to use Vercel with their free deployments, but because I also needed a subdomain with PHP I switched to my cheap $3/month (unlimited website) webhost to serve the static files; but I also use Cloudflare for their free CDN. And the app demos are hosted on GitHub through Releases. The storefront is "free" through Chec.io in that I only pay a small fraction of every transaction.

Huge thank you to Vercel for making deploying Gatsby websites so easy (I run https://yboris.dev/ and https://yboris.com/ through them for free). Huge thank you to GitHub (I run https://income-inequality.info/ through it).

I run my matrix homeserver and ssh proxy for stuff hosted at home on Oracle free. They also offer ARM vms now.

In running OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com/) which itself has a generous free tier, about 5 days of the month I rely on AWS's free tier for AWS Lambda, I managed to run on Vercel.com's free tier with Next.js until around my 8th paying customer, and my business update newsletter relies on ConvertKit's free tier.

I have a small mailing list for a few selected friends running on heroku (hosting a small website and then using the scheduler plugin to fire emails) + sendgrid free tier.

I also have a dynamic website using a python CMS running on free heroku which the admin uses to update the website. An heroku scheduler run a netlify job every 6 hours which download the dynamic website and publishes it as a static website.

a customizable feed of indie label new releases: https://dill.vercel.app

I run https://thisstartupacquisitionannouncementdoesnotexist.ajnis... on the free tier of Google App Engine.

And https://www.redditreads.com on the free tier of Google Compute Engine.

I run https://gez.la on Vercel's free tier.

My favorite stack is now google cloud run + DynamoDB.

I built a little template for myself to quickly start new projects, that is also hosted with this free tier:

https://forever-free-cloud-app-starter.chriszhu.me/

I like vercel a lot, does the same thing as Netlify. Also using Supabase and Feta for some other projects!

r614.dev

https://algot.io

I use the free tier for firebase to store real time trade data. The front-end was built using Next.js and hosted using the Vercel free tier.

http://algostrategies.io

A FE only solution to find trading strategies. Paying only for domain, lives in Amazon s3

I use Netlify’s free tier to host static sites.

- Firebase have a very generous free tier

- Github pages is always great

heroku