this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
760 points (99.2% liked)

Programmer Humor

19817 readers
73 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They probably get you in bandwidth fees over X amount. It would cost pennies for a small scale virtual server with big numbers as the hardware is shared, it would spend most of the time not doing anything. They could set up a machine and oversell a tier like that and make it all back with profit on their first bill.

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

I bet they run these free accounts on their test infrastructure, not production. What they get from it is real-world user testing of changes to their infrastructure, similar to how Microsoft uses its Windows Home versions for testing new updates.