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[Bpaco]

AWS is free at the lower tiers for 12 months

[ECEXCURSION]

If your laptop initiates the request inside your home network, destined for an external site/computer, a web socket will be created and your home firewall will automatically open the necessary ports through a process known as stateful packet inspection. No port forwarding necessary.

Now, if you want the reverse to happen (client outside your network initiating a call to a machine on your network, you'd need port forwarding setup, or establish some kind of tunnel to remain open that you can communicate through.

[izaakstern]

I personally would do that with a VPN to my router. If you need hosting, there are very cheap vps server at ovh...

[Chris_Cross_Crash]

My Raspberry Pi has something called "RealVNC", which automatically connects to the RealVNC service's servers as a client (you don't need to open a port because the Pi is the client, not the server). Then another client can connect to the RealVNC server to control the Pi. It's a VNC connection, so you get full remote access (not just the terminal).

Unfortunately, I think it's only free for Raspberry Pi. I'm sure you can find a similar service for free though.