Why even bother with contacting an account executive? It's $7 per dyno per month for the cheapest hobby tier. That's peanuts compared to any fees for a paid bootcamp. Heck, with inflation, that barely buys a bag of peanuts.

Plus the students would have an incentive to learn about shutting down unused resources that would pay dividends if they ever deploy to AWS. It'd be like a home economic lesson for hosted services.

$7/mo and access to a payment method might be a stopper for someone in the third world. But it's a private company, not a charity. Somebody else can solve that problem for the truly deserving.

I think it's incredible they've provided free services for over a decade and would love to know what percent of their free compute resource have simply be hijacked by crypto miners, torrent downloaders, and VPNs. It's got to be enormous and the simple requirement of a payment card would add enough KYC to eliminate all of them.

Yes, but you also really need Postgres and that's now an extra $9/month too.

$0 -> $16

Stop giving up, we tested several alternatives not too long ago and it's possible to get a small DB for free: https://nixsanctuary.com/best-paas-backend-hosting-heroku-vs...

Heroku Dyno + free cochroachdb instance, reasonable enough

I won't choose cockroachdb as a first learning DB, though it maybe fine (or overkill) for hobby project.