That’s no better than Windows (without a lot of effort and a constant game of cat and mouse only achievable by technical users). At least Google’s cloud services tend to actually be good, if you made peace with the tracking and privacy concerns.
If you can get that 5k/month down to let's say 1k, that's a saving of 48k over the course of a year. You can get a consultant/freelancer for half that sum that'll happily do it for you.
The parent's experience which mirrors my own - on a clean residential IP that hasn't sent any traffic I hit that "rate-limit" on my first request to the commits list view.
So there is no rate-limit, it's a default deny for unauthenticated requests... which could be fine but at least update the error message to reflect that.
Yeah this is just typical techbro gaslighting. There is no rate-limit and hasn't been for years (it's just default deny), but they refuse to change the wording to reflect.
But unless you're on a PaaS, you have "infrastructure engineers" already. So why not at least let them make back their salary by making them built a cost-efficient infrastructure?
> they said they must show they are on Hyperscaling cloud.
This is the main reason; and it applies to developers (they need cloud buzzwords on their resume), it applies to managers (who in turn hire only those with said buzzwords) and it applies to company execs/CTOs who can brag about the complex (self-inflicted) problems their company is solving at the next cloud provider conference, so they can justify yet another VC round.
Run this for over a decade, and you'll end up in a situation where an entire generation of "engineers" is no longer capable of configuring a Linux box to serve some basic webapp and will make up whatever reasons to avoid even attempting to do so.
Unless we're talking actual PaaS (Heroku, Render, Railway, etc), the cloud also needs a dedicated skillset, so "cloud" doesn't remove the need from a sysadmin.
If you can get (and trust they do it right) developers to do AWS or Kubernetes, you should be able to trust them to do conventional Linux sysadmin on a bunch of dedicated boxes.
There's a multibillion dollar industry that lives only because they managed to successfully convince an entire generation of "engineers" to become helpless and not be able to serve an HTTP response using their own hardware even if their life depended on it.
Here's a low-tech approach: an SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram bot. You can just text it the info and even the location. This means all the logic is server-side and nothing on the client.
A shared AirTag could probably take care of the location issue easily. I assume that in this scenario with exclusively trusted users, trading off privacy for the convenience might be worthwhile.
Don't pawn shops already solve this problem? Make your way there, dump your stuff, get peanuts for it in exchange (but might still be worth it if you truly don't need said stuff).