research(saas): complete free-services evaluation — 11 services, wall/excess verdicts, GCP/AWS guardrails

Part of epic #1047. Standing task from the SaaS pricing thread (Drew, 2026-10-21, marked IMPORTANT, does not close with the Oct 20 queue).

Complete free-services-to-check.md — every row is still "to check": boats.cloud, quic.cloud, Backblaze B2, OVHcloud, Railway, Render, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Heroku, Google Cloud, AWS.
For each, per the standing protocol: dated snapshot of the official free-tier wording, what is actually free, and the overage verdict (wall / throttle / excess-bills). File results into the file + the evidence baseline; services we adopt get master-tracker rows and hub cards via #1047's other children.
Guardrails first for the excess-billing clouds: GCP — spend only the Google AI Pro $10/mo credit, budget alert + automatic billing-disable configured (or billing not enabled at all) before any use; AWS — free-tier usage alerts + minimal IAM before any use. Highest surprise-bill risk on the list; do not create billable resources while evaluating.
Vercel is already in use — its useful integrations/limits check rides along here if the Vercel collector issue in this epic does not cover it.

CODE-204

🤖 Agent note · done

Agent: queue worker (repo-worker-code), lane D
Session / ID: queue task 2330
Found via: queue claim
Task: Triage verdict for research(saas): complete free-services evaluation — 11 services, wall/excess verdicts, GCP/AWS guardrails #1059 — CONFIRMED, the evaluation is untouched
Expectation: done — verdict below, follow-up routed

Verdict: CONFIRMED — every one of the 11 services is still "to check" and no overage verdict has been verified.

Evidence (fresh read of the tracked file, which lives in the notes workspace — projects/devices-services/free-services-to-check.md, mirrored here at workspace/ai-subscriptions/free-services-to-check.md):

Line 3 of the file: "Every row below is still "to check" until research(saas): complete free-services evaluation — 11 services, wall/excess verdicts, GCP/AWS guardrails #1059 closes it with a dated wording snapshot + wall/excess verdict in the evidence baseline" — and §To check: "All rows are Status = "to check" as of 2026-10-21."
All 11 rows (boats.cloud, quic.cloud, Backblaze B2, OVHcloud, Railway, Render, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Heroku, Google Cloud, AWS) carry Status to check; 8 of them carry Overage behavior "verify when checked", and the other three (B2, Heroku, GCP/AWS) carry expectations or partial prior notes — none carries a dated, verified wall/throttle/excess-bills verdict.
A grep of the sibling records in the same folder (ai-plans, master tracker, cloudflare-and-fly) finds no completed evaluation of these 11 anywhere else. The file's own STANDING GUARDRAIL states the consequence: "not knowing means not adopted" — so the fleet currently cannot adopt any of them.

Routing: follow-up enqueued as queue task 2996 (small_fix, dedupe repo-health:v1:fix:developing-today/code:issue:1059, packet queue-packets/packet-1059-fix.json), following the file's own standing protocol: per service, a dated official-wording snapshot (quote + URL + date) into the evidence baseline, what is actually free in concrete units, a wall/throttle/excess-bills verdict, and the guardrail state required before adoption — with the GCP and AWS guardrail evaluations written first (GCP: AI Pro $10 credit only + budget alert + automatic billing-disable or billing never enabled; AWS: free-tier usage alerts + minimal IAM). Research only: the packet explicitly forbids signups, account creation, adding cards, or enabling billing, and adoption recommendations come back here as follow-ups for Drew to rule on — with the completed table summarized on this issue itself. This issue stays open and is labelled queue/queued for that task.

🤖 Agent note · picked up

Agent: queue worker (repo-worker-code), lane D
Session / ID: queue task 2996
Found via: queue claim
Task: Complete the 11-service free-tier evaluation for research(saas): complete free-services evaluation — 11 services, wall/excess verdicts, GCP/AWS guardrails #1059 — dated official-wording snapshots in the evidence baseline + wall/throttle/excess-bills verdicts and guardrail notes in free-services-to-check.md (research only, no signups/accounts/cards/billing)
Expectation: effort class l; done = all 11 rows updated (or explicitly "verdict: unverified — "), GCP/AWS guardrails first in the summary, closing summary on this issue
Links: queue task 2996

🤖 Agent note · done

Agent: queue worker (repo-worker-code), lane D
Session / ID: queue task 2996
Found via: queue claim
Task: Complete the 11-service free-tier evaluation — dated official-wording snapshots + wall/throttle/excess-bills verdicts + guardrail states
Expectation: done — all 11 rows evaluated 2026-10-29 from official provider pages; snapshots in the evidence baseline §5, rows updated in free-services-to-check.md

Evaluation complete — 2026-10-29

Research only: no account was created, no card was added, no billing was enabled, and no service was adopted during this evaluation.

Files updated (Drew's notes workspace, projects/devices-services/, mirrored at workspace/ai-subscriptions/):

free-services-to-check.md — every row now Status = checked 2026-10-29 (or explicitly unverified, boats.cloud), with verdict + guardrail.
evidence-and-interpretation-baseline-2026-10-20.md — new §5 snapshot register: per-service official source URL, access date 2026-10-29, and the exact wording each verdict rests on.

Guardrails first — GCP and AWS (highest surprise-bill risk)

Google Cloud — verdict: excess-bills (Paid account). Free Trial ($300 / 90 days) is itself a wall — the account closes and resources stop if not upgraded — but on a Paid account "Any usage that exceeds the Free Tier usage limits is billed at standard rates" (Free Tier: 1× e2-micro/mo, 5 GB-months storage, 1 TiB BigQuery/mo, 2M Cloud Run req/mo). Before any use: spend only the Google AI Pro $10/mo credit, and put the automatic billing-disable automation in place (programmatic budget notification → Pub/Sub → function that disables billing, tested) — or don't enable billing at all. Budget alerts alone do NOT cap spend: Google's own docs say budgets "do not enable or prevent spending".
AWS — verdict: wall on the new Free Plan; excess-bills on Paid. New accounts (from 2025-07-15) get up to $200 credits and a Free Plan for up to 6 months: "No charges incurred unless you switch to the Paid Plan." The plan expires at credit exhaustion or 6 months (whichever first), then 90 days to upgrade or the account is closed/deleted. Before any Paid use: Free Tier usage alerts (85% emails) + a zero-spend budget configured first, minimal IAM. Warning: enrolling a Free Plan account in AWS Organizations auto-upgrades it to Paid and silently removes the wall.

All 11 rows — before → after

Service	Before (2026-10-21)	After (checked 2026-10-29)
boats.cloud	to check / verify when checked	verdict: unverified — no official boats.cloud site, pricing, or docs exists or resolves (domain fetch failed, no site results); nothing to evaluate. Not boatcloud.com or boat.dev. Do not adopt; provider identity required first
quic.cloud	to check / verify when checked	wall — CDN Free: unlimited bandwidth, 6 US/EU PoPs; DNS free for CDN users; optimization free quota 100 images / 20 page-opt / 20 LQIP per month, pauses at exhaustion, extra only via prepaid credit. Recheck 2026-11-10: announced plan billing downgrades over-allowance CDN domains to the smaller US/EU network (throttle element)
Backblaze B2	to check / "excess-bills, but cheap" (unverified)	excess-bills (verified) — first 10 GB free (no card needed), egress free to 3x average storage + unlimited via partners incl. Cloudflare, $0.01/GB beyond; storage past 10 GB $6.95/TB/mo per main pricing page (transaction page still shows $0.005/GB/mo — discrepancy flagged in baseline §5). Guardrail: no-card first; alerts/caps before adding a payment method
OVHcloud	to check / verify when checked	excess-bills — no permanent free tier; one-time first-project trial voucher (CA$270 CA page, market-specific), 1 month, payment method required upfront, auto-billed after credit. Postpaid, billed until deleted; no hard cap found
Railway	to check / verify when checked	excess-bills (paid plans) — $5 trial grant / 30 days, no card; then permanent Free = $1 credit/mo. Hobby usage past its included $5 is charged the delta; hard limit exists but is opt-in — set it before adding a post-paid card
Render	to check / verify when checked	wall (no payment method) — 750 Free instance hrs/workspace/mo, then Free web services suspend; bandwidth/build overage bills only if a card exists. Free Postgres expires 30 days + 14-day grace — never durable data
DigitalOcean	to check / verify when checked	excess-bills — no permanent free compute tier; $200 / 60-day trial requires a card, overage charges the card, resources keep billing after day 60; alerts are email-only. Destroy (not power off) to stop billing
Hetzner	to check / verify when checked	excess-bills — no free tier or trial found on official pages; hourly with monthly cap, traffic overage bills, off servers bill until deleted, cost alerts explicitly not a spending limit; retroactive billing, no prepay
Heroku	to check / verify when checked	wall (Eco, paid) — no free tier since 2022-11-28 (free dynos/Postgres/Redis discontinued). Eco $5/mo = 1,000 shared dyno hrs, sleeps at exhaustion, hours can't be bought. Cheapest app+DB = $10/mo
Google Cloud	to check / verify when checked	excess-bills (Paid) — see guardrails-first section above
AWS	to check / verify when checked	wall (Free Plan) / excess-bills (Paid) — see guardrails-first section above

Adoption follow-ups for Drew (nothing adopted by this task)

No service is recommended for silent adoption. The ones that now pass the guardrail on paper, if Drew wants them, each need a follow-up (master-tracker row + hub card via #1047's children):

QUIC.cloud Free — wall verdict, no credit needed; recheck after the 2026-11-10 billing-model change before relying on it.
Backblaze B2 free 10 GB — usable no-card as a backup target; adding a card is the decision point (alerts/caps first).
AWS Free Plan — a true wall for evaluation use, but the 6-month / credit-exhaustion clock and the Organizations auto-upgrade trap need a deliberate start.
boats.cloud — blocked on identity: no official site exists to evaluate; needs Drew to confirm what service/name was meant.

agent-note:v1
state: triaged (coverage pass)
Coverage pass 2026-11-03: reviewed in the fleet-wide per-issue pass (drift / overlap / already-handled / stale / blockers / ordering). Verdict: still live; queued in repo-health-code-pilot as triage at priority 30 (priority/none). If this is already handled at current main, the triage closes it with evidence; if it needs splitting, the triage files the split.
Found via: coverage pass 2026-11-03

Triage @ current main (2026-11-03)

Verdict: the issue is still live but its premise is stale. The 11-service evaluation itself was completed on 2026-10-29; what remains is the per-service adopt/skip decision and guardrail evidence. This should be re-scoped, not rebuilt.

Evidence

The evaluation is recorded as done. pm-stack/aggregator/src/project-config.ts:595 (merged to main 2026-11-02 via PR fix(design-code): repoint :18745 legs to antigravity-direct :18751 (#1413, unblocks opencode#1409) #4626) states: "The 2026-10-26 SaaS review list — boats.cloud, quic.cloud, Backblaze B2, OVHcloud, Railway, Render, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Heroku, GCP, AWS — was evaluated on 2026-10-29 in the workspace tracker (ai-subscriptions/free-services-to-check.md), each service with an overage verdict under the no-surprise-bills guardrail. What remains is the per-service adopt/skip decision; boats.cloud stays unverified and untouched (no official site resolves)." That directly contradicts the body's "every row is still 'to check'".
The named file is not in this repo. No free-services* path exists at main (find/grep over the tree), and there is no history of one. It lives in the workspace (~/workspace/ai-subscriptions/free-services-to-check.md), which is not mounted on this host — so a repo worker cannot read the live file state or "complete the file" from a repo worktree.
No superseding issue. Epic epic(usage-hub): SaaS/cloud services completion — v2 live collectors, daily console reads, v3 reconciliation #1047 is open and lists the research record (baseline, tracker, free-services list) as a dashboard requirement; no child issue owns the adopt/skip pass. research(saas): complete free-services evaluation — 11 services, wall/excess verdicts, GCP/AWS guardrails #1059 is the only place that decision lives.
Guardrails are unproven in-repo. No committed evidence of a GCP budget alert + automatic billing-disable or AWS free-tier usage alerts/minimal IAM. Those are console actions, so the repo can only record where they are configured and when they were verified — it cannot prove them.

Narrowed scope (what #1059 should now mean)

Adopt/skip rows for the 11 services, each with a one-line reason; boats.cloud explicitly recorded as unverifiable (no official site resolves) rather than left open.
Publish the verdicts into repo-visible records — tracker rows / dashboard provenance — because epic(usage-hub): SaaS/cloud services completion — v2 live collectors, daily console reads, v3 reconciliation #1047 requires the dashboard to link the research record instead of leaving it in workspace files alone.
Guardrail evidence for GCP and AWS: date, exact console configuration state (budget alert, billing-disable or billing-not-enabled, free-tier alerts, minimal IAM), and where it is documented. No billable resources are created to verify this.
Leave the 2026-10-29 per-service verdicts as the evidence baseline; do not re-research the 10 reachable services.

Blockers / prerequisites

Access: the workspace file (~/workspace/ai-subscriptions/free-services-to-check.md) and the evidence baseline are not available to a repo worker on this host. Either the file is moved/committed into the repo (the epic already wants the dashboard to link it) or the task must be executed where the workspace lives. Without it, "every row is still to check" cannot be checked at all.
Ordering: the adopt/skip pass should land before epic(usage-hub): SaaS/cloud services completion — v2 live collectors, daily console reads, v3 reconciliation #1047's tracker-row/hub-card children consume it; guardrail evidence can land independently.

Recommendation

Re-scope #1059 to the narrowed items above (or split items 1–2 from 3), close the "evaluation" half with the 2026-10-29 evidence already cited, and record the workspace-file location/commit decision on the issue. This is a documents-and-decisions task, not a code fix in this repo.

🤖 Agent note · picked up

Agent: queue worker (repo-worker-code), OpenChamber scheduled lane 8ac61616-3815-4e7b-b33d-840a3829154a
Session / ID: queue task 8044
Found via: queue claim
Task: Publish the 11-service adopt/skip dispositions and dated, sourced GCP/AWS guardrail evidence for research(saas): complete free-services evaluation — 11 services, wall/excess verdicts, GCP/AWS guardrails #1059 / epic epic(usage-hub): SaaS/cloud services completion — v2 live collectors, daily console reads, v3 reconciliation #1047; do not create billable resources.
Expectation: work from verifiable repo-visible evidence only; do not infer live account guardrails from prior comments or claim console configuration that has not been checked.
Links: queue task 8044 · research(saas): complete free-services evaluation — 11 services, wall/excess verdicts, GCP/AWS guardrails #1059 · epic(usage-hub): SaaS/cloud services completion — v2 live collectors, daily console reads, v3 reconciliation #1047

Revalidated: #1059 and #1047 are open, no open PR matching #1059 was found, and PR #4626 is merged but only changes the design-code proxy. Hard-stop labels are absent.

test(aggregator): assert free-services entry in done per #1059 (Codex…

Merge pull request #5070 from developing-today/queue/8044-1059-free-s…

agent-note:v1
state: done

Queue task 8044 (lane code-n, 2026-11-03) — the narrowed #1059 remainder is published in the repo via PR #5070 (merged 64119f7):

Adopt/skip rows for all 11 services with one-line reasons + provenance links, in doc/2026-11-03T18-30-00Z_record_free_services_adoption.md, resting on the 2026-10-29 evaluation (comment 6501568013 + workspace evidence baseline §5). Nothing is adopted yet under the no-surprise-bills guardrail; quic.cloud, Backblaze B2 and the AWS Free Plan are named adopt candidates pending Drew (each adoption is a follow-up: master-tracker row + hub card via epic(usage-hub): SaaS/cloud services completion — v2 live collectors, daily console reads, v3 reconciliation #1047's children).
boats.cloud is explicitly recorded as unverifiable (no official site resolves; provider identity required first) — not left open.
GCP/AWS guardrail state recorded with verification date + configuration location: as of 2026-11-03, NOT CONFIGURED / NOT VERIFIED in any console; the record names where each guardrail must be configured (GCP Billing → Budgets & alerts + tested programmatic billing-disable; AWS Billing → Free Tier usage alerts, zero-spend budget, minimal IAM) and states plainly that no console state was inferred. No billable resources were created.
Dashboard provenance: the project-config.ts "Free-services pass" editorial entry moved from next to done pointing at the record; program.test.ts updated to assert the completed entry (Codex P2 on PR docs(saas): #1059 free-services adopt/skip record + GCP/AWS guardrail state #5070, fixed and re-reviewed clean).

What remains on this issue is genuinely Drew's: ruling on the three adopt candidates, and — before any GCP/AWS use — the console guardrail configuration the record describes.

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research(saas): complete free-services evaluation — 11 services, wall/excess verdicts, GCP/AWS guardrails #1059

Evaluation complete — 2026-10-29

Guardrails first — GCP and AWS (highest surprise-bill risk)

All 11 rows — before → after

Adoption follow-ups for Drew (nothing adopted by this task)

2 remaining items

Triage @ current main (2026-11-03)

Evidence

Narrowed scope (what #1059 should now mean)

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research(saas): complete free-services evaluation — 11 services, wall/excess verdicts, GCP/AWS guardrails #1059

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developing-today commented on Oct 27, 2026

dezren39 commented on Oct 29, 2026

dezren39 commented on Oct 29, 2026

dezren39 commented on Oct 29, 2026

Evaluation complete — 2026-10-29

Guardrails first — GCP and AWS (highest surprise-bill risk)

All 11 rows — before → after

Adoption follow-ups for Drew (nothing adopted by this task)

2 remaining items

dezren39 commented on Nov 3, 2026

dezren39 commented on Nov 3, 2026

Triage @ current main (2026-11-03)

Evidence

Narrowed scope (what #1059 should now mean)

Blockers / prerequisites

Recommendation

dezren39 commented on Nov 3, 2026

dezren39 commented on Nov 3, 2026

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