As somebody who started his web career on free webhosts, and who still uses free platforms for many things, I was thrilled to come across a project hosted at github which connects people to free online services in the form of a categorized list called "Stack on a budget".

In a couple paragraphs, Stack on a budget is explained as:

This repository offers a collection of services with great free tiers for developers on a budget. Because not everyone has 20$ per month to spend on app or database hosting for every single side-project.

Nowadays, a lot of services are offering really good free tier more than enough for testing small apps and even put them in production. They are just waiting to be used by you.

I discovered a lot of free services that I hadn't known about before, like IBM Bluemix which will let you host your app for free with a half GB of free memory each month. OpenShift, which I have heard of and used, is also listed and lets you host an app free of charge with 512MB of memory and 1GB of storage.

Stack on a budget also lists free Database hosting providers, search providers, user authentication providers, free email senders, and free static app hosting providers.

There's a lot to look at. If you're interested in starting a project on a shoestring, check out Stack on a budget.