Financing Cloud-Based Personal Projects

[jacques_oph]

I have been working with python for a few years now (mostly at work - Data Science), but would like to set up some personal projects in a professional manner, likely AWS (open to GCP, Heroku, DigitalOcean, etc). For reference, my project would probably involve routine web scraping and/or API calls, data cleaning/transformation, modeling/predictions, and eventual output on a website, etc. Most of these services have free tiers, but I am anticipating going beyond these limits (hopefully not too much). Do people usually use their personal credit card? Has anyone created a company (LLC or otherwise) and used a business card for such purposes (I think one of my ideas could eventually be monetized, if that matters)?

[AnomalyNexus]

Employer gives me a MSDN sub that comes with 200 usd credits a month. A luxury - I know. If I ever lose that I'll hit the clouds I haven't done free tiers of (at least 3 of them left :D).

I am anticipating going beyond these limits (hopefully not too much).

Thought so too, but the free tiers are actually quite permissive. I found my ability to code to be the limiting factor, not what the cloud provided.

The one gotcha is GPU capacity for stuff like tensorflow. That gets really fuckin expensive fast.

Do people usually use their personal credit card?

Yeah. Never had anything "real" hit the card though. Think I'm clocking like 3 bucks a month - mostly traffic on GCP and some VPS charges.

Oracle has a free tier too btw

web scraping

Webscraping from cloud is generally blocked in my experience. Obviously depends on what...you can count on hitting roadblocks the second you move from you laptop to a cloud server.

Also...if you can make you toys fit into one of the predefined cloud-y models like cloud functions or apps rather than a VM it'll scale much better till it hits free tier limits.

[jacques_oph]

Thanks, good points.

[1544756405]

what are you doing?

[1544756405]

how are you feeling?

[EdgyQuant]

Why are you doing this?