Those “free” credits on these cloud providers are akin to how drug dealers sell unadulterated product in small amounts to new users to get them hooked. Then repeat business is the cut product with high markup.

The big brained maneuver is probably to build a cloud agnostic stack and migrate between these clouds, negotiating free credits as you go. Done right you could probably pay no cloud bills for several years.

The problem is that one does not simply build “cloud agnostic” services and you would probably spend a not insignificant amount of time migrating between them every year or two. But if you were really good at cloud and could do this efficiently and quickly it would probably be worth it

> one does not simply build “cloud agnostic” services

Why? From personal experience, everything I do is either:

- a static site, which you can run on anything from Netlify to some static CDN to GitLab Pages to a potato, or

- a bunch of Docker containers, which I usually run on Docker Swarm on any random VPS, and manage with my own little tool, https://lunni.dev/; AWS of course has some “cloud native” options for that, too (ECS + Fargate?), but I find predictable monthly bill a bit better on my nerves.

This and some S3-compatible storage do wonders for me.

Spinnaker project was supposed to make multi-cloud somewhat feasible. Assuming your application stack was fully "cloud native" with none to minimal vendor lock in to specific cloud provider products.