You Can Host and Launch Apps for Free in 2020

So far, I have spent $0 on front-end web hosting, $0 on server hosting, $0 on database hosting, and $0 on human resources. My app is hosted and I'm just gaining users, I have $0 in costs.

How did I do it? Cherry picking the corporate advertising schemes by large tech service providers.

My newest app - Waygo - has been originally a project I built for fun without intention to make money from. I know there's many people out there who are building apps without necessarily any funding - and they need to kickstart the application to start making money that they can invest to build bigger. I imagine this scenario has reduced the ideas of some ambitious developers. In 2020, this scenario is a whole lot easier.

Front-End

Static front-end web hosting is easy enough nowadays. You can build a very dynamic website and host it for free on many sites - Vercel, Heroku - Forever. I built the majority of Waygo as just a front-end application that was very dynamic by just interacting with public API's, such as Mapbox.

Back-End

At some point, you're going to want a server for any usage of your app. Today, the serverless environment has made it possible to put your server ON your front-end client. This means you can write backend routes, and host them on that FREE front-end hosting service I mentioned above. All operations hosted in the cloud, free build environments, and they sync using Git and GitHub for you.

If you're ambitious enough, you can also take advantage of the copious free tiers provided by the big providers. Azure provides 12 months of free service with $260 credit. That's a year's worth of kickstart. AWS Lambda provides 1 million free requests per month, and AWS provides an unbelievable number of services for free 12 month trials. All of these are 12-month run-times of web, server, and database hosting to put your app out there for free and start growth.

Self-Sustaining End-Goal

The end goal of your time in the free life is to be able to switch off of it. After 12 months of building and growing, you get to reach a point where your app can pay for itself. Then you can start using services like DigitalOcean or even continue with AWS or Azure to host your services for $30/month easily. Now your app is out there - and you never even spent anything.

Check out Waygo - my navigation/routing and traffic app I'm working on for fun without cost.

Also growing a Youtube channel out of my dev projects, let me know what you think of them!