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Ten Internet Philanthropists 🍱

Recognized by tech circles · A developer's guide to free lunch
中文English

In Chinese tech circles, "大善人" (dà shànrén, "great philanthropists") is an affectionate title for internet companies whose free tiers are generous to the point of absurdity — some even call Cloudflare the "Cyber Living Buddha".

What they share: core services free, quotas genuinely usable, overages pause service instead of charging you. This page ranks ten community-recognized philanthropists by reputation across Chinese and American tech circles, each with a "free lunch guide": where to claim it, whether a credit card is required, and the pitfalls.

Researched 2026-10-05 · Figures cross-checked against official pricing pages and 2026 developer guides.

Quick index:
🥇 Cloudflare🥈 Oracle Cloud🥉 Let's Encrypt4 GitHub5 Google6 Hugging Face7 Vercel8 Supabase9 Netlify10 AWS
🥇
NO.1

Cloudflare

The Cyber Living Buddha · Leading philanthropist
Free foreverNo card for core services; card required for R2

🎁 What You Get Free

  • CDN + DNS + free SSL + DDoS protection: unlimited domains and traffic
  • Workers: 100,000 requests/day (10ms CPU per request)
  • Pages: unlimited bandwidth and requests, 500 builds/month
  • R2 object storage: 10GB + 1M Class A / 10M Class B ops per month, zero egress fees
  • D1 database 5GB, KV 1GB, Tunnel completely free
  • Workers AI: 10,000 Neurons/day of free inference

📖 Free Lunch Guide

  • Sign up at cloudflare.com with just an email, live in minutes; R2 requires adding a credit card (no charge within free quota)
  • Pitfalls: Workers free tier caps CPU at 10ms per request; R2 can't be enabled without a card
  • Pro tips: Pages + Workers + R2 + D1 can run a complete website at zero cost; Tunnel exposes your home NAS without a public IP; overages pause service, never charge
💬 Called "Cyber Living Buddha" in Chinese circles; a 2026 dev.to guide called its free tier "probably the most generous for real production use."
Sources: free-for-dev list
🥈
NO.2

Oracle Cloud

The OG philanthropist · Legend of Chinese VPS circles
Free forever (Always Free)Credit card required, strict fraud screening

🎁 What You Get Free

  • 4 Arm Ampere A1 cores + 24GB RAM (splittable into up to 4 VMs), or 2 AMD VMs
  • 200GB block storage total, 10GB object storage
  • 10TB outbound traffic per month
  • 2 autonomous databases (20GB each), 1 load balancer

📖 Free Lunch Guide

  • Sign up at oracle.com/cloud/free — credit card + phone verification; Arm capacity often shows "out of capacity", retry in other regions
  • Pitfalls: registration rejection is the norm; Arm quota is first-come-first-served; never launch a paid instance by accident
  • Pro tips: the 4-core/24GB Arm VM is the crown jewel; hide the real IP behind Cloudflare
💬 Hailed as the great philanthropist in Chinese VPS circles; a 2026 review called it "the industry's most generous permanent free compute."
Sources: Oracle Cloud Free Tier
🥉
NO.3

Let's Encrypt

The purest philanthropist · Nonprofit
Free forever (no paid plans)No account, no credit card needed

🎁 What You Get Free

  • Free DV X.509 certificates, including wildcards
  • 90-day validity, auto-issuance and renewal via ACME
  • 50 certificates per registered domain per week; the world's largest CA, serving 700M+ sites

📖 Free Lunch Guide

  • No signup — install certbot, one command issues a cert (e.g. certbot --nginx -d example.com)
  • Pitfalls: 90-day validity requires automated renewal; DV only, no OV/EV
  • Pro tips: one wildcard command covers all subdomains
💬 "The unsung hero behind HTTPS adoption across the web" — free certificates are now the default for new sites.
Sources: Wikipedia
4
NO.4

GitHub (Microsoft)

Developer utilities
Free foreverNo card for the free tier

🎁 What You Get Free

  • Actions: 2,000 minutes/month (unlimited for public repos)
  • Codespaces: 120 core-hours + 15GB storage per month
  • Unlimited public/private repos; free GitHub Pages; 500MB Packages
  • Copilot free tier: 2,000 completions + 50 premium requests per month

📖 Free Lunch Guide

  • Sign up at github.com with an email; Codespaces launches from any repo page
  • Pitfalls: Actions minutes burn at multiplier rates on macOS/Windows; remember to stop Codespaces
  • Pro tips: unlimited Actions on public repos is the open-source CI standard; self-hosted runners save minutes
💬 The "water and electricity" of developer infrastructure — free CI/CD plus cloud IDE at zero cost.
Sources: GitHub pricing docs
5
NO.5

Google

The fastest free GPU in a browser tab
Colab ongoing; GCP trial 90 daysColab needs no card; GCP trial requires one

🎁 What You Get Free

  • Colab free tier: T4 GPU (16GB VRAM), ~12GB RAM; ~90 min idle timeout, ~12 h max session
  • GCP trial: $300 credit, valid 90 days (largest of the big three)
  • Always Free: e2-micro instance (US regions) forever, 1GB egress/month

📖 Free Lunch Guide

  • Use colab.research.google.com directly; GCP trial at cloud.google.com/free
  • Pitfalls: billing starts automatically after trial if upgraded; Colab free GPUs are best-effort
  • Pro tips: mount Google Drive in Colab for persistence; Kaggle's 30 free GPU-hours/week is a good backup
💬 "The fastest free GPU in a browser tab"; the $300 trial credit is the largest among AWS/Azure/GCP.
Sources: Colab alternatives 2026
6
NO.6

Hugging Face

Philanthropist of the AI open-source community
Free foreverNo card required

🎁 What You Get Free

  • Model hub & datasets: unlimited downloads, completely free
  • Spaces: free CPU tier (2 vCPU / 16GB RAM) for Gradio/Streamlit apps
  • ZeroGPU: dynamic NVIDIA H200, 3.5 free minutes/day for logged-in users
  • Inference Providers: 100,000 free credits/month

📖 Free Lunch Guide

  • Sign up at huggingface.co; create a Space demo from any model page in one click
  • Pitfalls: free Spaces sleep when idle; ZeroGPU's few daily minutes aren't enough for heavy inference
  • Pro tips: Spaces is the default for AI demos; grab 3.5 free H200 minutes a day
💬 The AI open-source community's "great philanthropist" — the default starting point for indie developers.
Sources: free-ai-bible
7
NO.7

Vercel

The frontend hosting benchmark
Free foreverNo card required

🎁 What You Get Free

  • Hobby tier: 100GB bandwidth/month
  • Serverless/Edge function invocations roughly in the hundreds of thousands to ~1M/month (sources differ)
  • 6,000 build minutes/month, 100 deployments/day

📖 Free Lunch Guide

  • Log in at vercel.com with GitHub, import a repo and it deploys
  • Pitfalls: Hobby is strictly non-commercial — ads, payments, or company projects violate the terms
  • Pro tips: personal blogs never hit the limits; for commercial projects use Netlify or Cloudflare Pages
💬 The benchmark for frontend hosting — but the non-commercial clause is the most complained-about term in 2026.
Sources: Vercel vs Netlify 2026
8
NO.8

Supabase

The open-source backend eating Firebase's lunch
Free foreverNo card required

🎁 What You Get Free

  • 2 active projects; 500MB PostgreSQL; 5GB bandwidth/month; 1GB file storage
  • Auth: 50,000 monthly active users; Edge Functions: 500K invocations/month

📖 Free Lunch Guide

  • Sign up at supabase.com, create a project in one click
  • Pitfalls: projects pause after 7 days of inactivity; writes fail past 500MB; no automatic backups
  • Pro tips: keep-alive with scheduled GitHub Actions pings; one account can own multiple orgs
💬 "The open-source backend eating Firebase's lunch" — its free tier is rated genuinely useful.
Sources: Supabase pricing 2026
9
NO.9

Netlify

Better than Vercel for making a living
Free foreverNo card required

🎁 What You Get Free

  • 100GB bandwidth/month (credit system since Sept 2025: 300 credits/month — check official pricing)
  • 300 build minutes/month; 125K serverless invocations/month; 1M Edge invocations/month

📖 Free Lunch Guide

  • Log in at netlify.com with GitHub — deploy by dragging a folder
  • Pitfalls: 300 build minutes is the real bottleneck; traffic and builds share the credit pool
  • Pro tips: biggest edge over Vercel — the free tier allows commercial use
💬 The Jamstack pioneer; 2026's keyword is "better than Vercel for making a living" — free commercial use is the key differentiator.
Sources: Vercel vs Netlify 2026
10
NO.10

AWS (Amazon)

Less generous than before, but still a giant
Credits expire; Always Free permanentCredit card required

🎁 What You Get Free

  • New accounts (after 2025-07-15): $200 in credits, valid 6 months
  • Always Free tier: Lambda 1M requests/month; DynamoDB 25GB; SNS/SQS 1M requests/month
  • Older accounts keep the previous 12-month free policy

📖 Free Lunch Guide

  • Sign up at aws.amazon.com/free — email + credit card + phone verification
  • Pitfalls: public IPv4 addresses are billed since Feb 2024; set up Budgets alerts
  • Pro tips: the Always Free Lambda + DynamoDB + S3 combo runs serverless apps at zero cost forever
💬 Reputation has slipped since the revamp; but the Always Free serverless trio remains hallowed ground.
Sources: AWS free tier in 2026 · AWS official free tier

🛠 Universal Claiming Tips

  1. Start card-free: eight of the ten require no credit card — "zero barrier to entry" is the true philanthropist's litmus test.
  2. Card-required safety: Oracle, AWS, and the GCP trial need a card. Use virtual/single-use cards, enable Budgets alerts, set a calendar reminder before trials expire.
  3. Keep-alive tricks: services that sleep when idle (Supabase, HF Spaces) can be kept warm with scheduled GitHub Actions pings.
  4. China-circle honorable mentions: Serv00 (card-free hosting), Qiniu (10GB free storage), SiliconFlow (free API credits).

⚠️ Cautionary Tales: Philanthropists Can Change Their Minds

Free is never a permanent promise. These former philanthropists already changed course:

  • Heroku: killed its free tier in 2022 — the end of an era.
  • PlanetScale: dropped its free database tier; developers migrated overnight.
  • Railway: ended its free Hobby plan in 2023.
  • Firebase: locked cloud storage behind the paid Blaze plan.

Lesson: always keep backups and a migration plan — never bet your livelihood on anyone's free tier.

Methodology note: Vercel's invocation numbers vary by source — conservative values used. Netlify moved to credits in Sept 2025; check official pricing for current figures. Oracle's screening is strict. Policies change — verify on official sites before signing up.