Authoritative project documentation

Cloud Free-Tier Deployment Spike

Status

Initial research completed 2026-07-15. Revalidate before selecting or publishing a provider-specific deployment because offers and limits change.

Question

Can the Cloudflare-first family profile support the near-free synchronized family target, and can Docker Compose on an ordinary cloud VM provide a dependable portable fallback without replacing or forking the core product?

Cloudflare hosting for the official .org, .app, and .dev frontends is already accepted by ADR 0006 and is not under evaluation in this spike. This spike evaluates application backend, data, media, and synchronization hosting.

Findings

Azure advertises a time-limited introductory credit, service-specific 12-month allowances, and always-free services with limits. Signup verification requires a payment card. See Azure Free Account.
AWS currently offers new customers credits for a free plan lasting up to six months; the free-plan account closes when the period or credits end unless it is converted. See AWS Free Tier.
Google Cloud offers introductory credit and an ongoing free tier with product and usage limits that are explicitly subject to change. See Google Cloud Free Program.
Cloudflare Workers and D1 have useful free allowances, but they enforce daily or total limits. D1 is a Cloudflare-managed SQLite service and would not be a transparent deployment of a PostgreSQL-based core. See Workers Pricing and D1 Pricing.

Recommendation

Implement and test Cloudflare first among cloud profiles, as accepted by ADR 0007, but do not make its free tier the core ApiaryLens architecture or promise that a deployment will remain free. Account creation, payment verification, time-limited credits, hard quotas, and provider-specific services remain product risks that require visible safeguards and a migration path.

This does not remove the goal of a free or near-free family cloud deployment. It means that goal must be proven against a reference workload, measured regularly, published with limits, and backed by a portable migration path rather than assumed from marketing labels.

Build provider-neutral product artifacts alongside the Cloudflare profile:

Installable PWA and researched device-local mode
OCI container images
Docker Compose server profile
Documented volumes, backup, restore, and upgrades
A versioned deployment-plan format

Docker Compose on a generic Linux VM is the second cloud target. Later provider templates may deploy those same artifacts to a VM or container platform. The Cloudflare-native implementation requires follow-up technical ADRs because it changes runtime, storage, operations, and testing while remaining bound to the same public contracts and portable exports.

The follow-up is tasks/006-research-family-cloud-profile.md.

Remaining Questions

What is the lowest supported local footprint?
Can personal mode safely avoid a server while preserving reliable backups?
Which generic VM sizes pass capacity tests for family use?
Does the Cloudflare profile pass the family workload, quota-exhaustion, backup, restore, export, and migration gates?
Which provider templates can be maintained without implying guaranteed free use?
What support burden is created by each provider's account, DNS, TLS, and billing flow?