Is anyone able to profit using the free tier in AWS or GC?

Hi,

i can talk about GCP, which i am pretty widely exposed to. I think it all depends on the type of service: if you have a very 'slim' one that basically does not need any specific feature, you might be in the free tier (of course i am talking about AppEngine, a.k.a. Standard Environment).

But if for example need to deploy containers, vms, whatever, it's a different story. For example Flexible environment, previously called Managed VMs, has no free tier.

Some prices are very cool, like Pub/Sub offering 10 GB/monthly for FREE. But, again, it's pretty fair to tell that if you need pub/sub technology probably you are out of the free tier concept.

It's really all about what you need to do.

I think you could do it if you were using Lambda and like @Felixg said, you could probably get it to all run on the one ec2 instance you can get under the free tier.

My main concern if you are using a single ec2 instance for a production product is reliability if that single instance were to go down. I'm a DevOps guy during the day though so I worry more about reliability and resiliency than the average Joe :)

I have used AWS a lot and yes, you totally could build a fully functioning product with the free tier. Depending on your product, it might require more effort to run everything on the same instance, but it's very possible. In terms of performance, you should be able to support a very decent number of users for a basic webapp with API.

While I try to keep cost down, I've never tried to keep it to zero because the effort to keep within the free tier usually outweighs the benefit of saving a couple of bucks a month.