Why Your Free AI Credits and Free VPS Are Only Rented

Free Gemini credits, the GitHub Student Pack, a free VPS — the advice everywhere is to grab all of them, because the cost is zero. The catch does not show up on day one. It shows up on the day the vendor changes the deal and your code has nowhere to go.

A free tier is a rental, not a gift. The question worth two minutes is whether the code you build on top of it can leave when the rent goes up.

What Happened

The comparison here is a 2021 genetic algorithm that could park a car. It worked in simulation, and that did not mean the same solution survived contact with the real world.

The argument is that free infrastructure follows the same rule. A free tier runs today. Tomorrow the vendor raises prices or shuts the service down, and the code written against it cannot move anywhere without a rewrite.

Why It Matters

The author did not stop using free tiers, and is not telling you to. What changed is the wrapping: each free service sits behind an adapter they wrote themselves. The service stays at arm's length, so swapping it out or throwing it away later is a small job instead of a rewrite.

That is the useful part of this take. Treat free credits and free servers as temporary tenants in your stack, not as foundations, and keep the seam between your code and theirs in your own hands.