Ask HN: Heroku equivalent for cheap intermittent jobs?

1 points by strangecasts 1y ago ↗ HN

I'm running what's essentially a quote-of-the-day bot, which retrieves a text from a queue on a regular schedule, and submits it to another service over an HTTPS API.

Since my free Azure credits have expired, I'm looking for a cheap place to run a very small Python script intermittently, with access to some form of persistent storage.

My patience for being my own sysadmin is steadily decreasing, so I'd rather not run it at home or on a manually managed VPS if I can help it - ideally I'd like something like Azure's Container App Job system, but on a fixed monthly charge rather than a pay-as-you-go system.

Does such a service exist?

4 comments

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toomuchtodo 1y ago ↗

Could Cloudflare Workers and R2 do this? There is a generous free tier, and on the paid plan, I cannot see you paying more than $5/month for this use case.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/

(no affiliation)

strangecasts 1y ago ↗

Oh, yeah, this would fit very well inside the free tier - I haven't used R2 but I'll give it a look

ChrisArchitect 1y ago ↗

err... what's wrong with Heroku?

But also, maybe GitHub + GitHub Actions

strangecasts 1y ago ↗

I was assuming Heroku was tailored towards long-running/autoscaling jobs, and didn't realize it let you set up one-off dynos on a scheduler - https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/scheduler - which would be a perfect fit, I guess I'll take a look at their Eco option!

I was also not aware GitHub let you run actions on a schedule, that could also work - but I guess you have to use artifacts for the persistence?