An AI chat grounded in my portfolio, a talking 3D avatar and an admin suite, on free plans and AWS student credits. Here is every service, what it does and what it costs.
AWS student credits
The server: Docker, nginx, the Node app and the AI gateway, on 1 GB of RAM shared with another site
Paid by student credits while they last.
Free tier
Content, logins, chat logs, anonymous visit counts
Free plan (serverless)
Vector search for the AI chat (768-dimension embeddings)
Self-hosted, free tiers
AI answers and embeddings: a gateway I host myself that moves between free model tiers
Free tiers have rate limits, which is why the chat has limits too.
Runs on your device
The 3D avatar, its natural voice (Kokoro on WebGPU) and voice notes (Whisper)
The models download once from Hugging Face and jsDelivr, then stay cached.
Free plan
Images uploaded in the admin panel
Free Gmail account
Contact form, login links, alerts
GitHub's free allowance
Type checks, builds, the Docker image and the weekly Lighthouse test
Free hostnames
The domain names
The No-IP name has to be confirmed every 30 days.
Free
HTTPS certificates
Free
My alerts and the admin bot
| Service | Used for | Plan | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS EC2 (t3.micro) | The server: Docker, nginx, the Node app and the AI gateway, on 1 GB of RAM shared with another sitePaid by student credits while they last. | AWS student credits | $0 |
| MongoDB Atlas | Content, logins, chat logs, anonymous visit counts | Free tier | $0 |
| Pinecone | Vector search for the AI chat (768-dimension embeddings) | Free plan (serverless) | $0 |
| FreeLLMAPI | AI answers and embeddings: a gateway I host myself that moves between free model tiersFree tiers have rate limits, which is why the chat has limits too. | Self-hosted, free tiers | $0 |
| Your browser | The 3D avatar, its natural voice (Kokoro on WebGPU) and voice notes (Whisper)The models download once from Hugging Face and jsDelivr, then stay cached. | Runs on your device | $0 |
| Cloudinary | Images uploaded in the admin panel | Free plan | $0 |
| Gmail SMTP | Contact form, login links, alerts | Free Gmail account | $0 |
From the anonymous visit counter: no cookies, no IPs, and a visitor ID that changes every day, so a returning visitor counts once per day.
See also performance and status.
| GitHub Actions + container registry |
|---|
| Type checks, builds, the Docker image and the weekly Lighthouse test |
| GitHub's free allowance |
| $0 |
| No-IP and is-a.dev | The domain namesThe No-IP name has to be confirmed every 30 days. | Free hostnames | $0 |
|---|
| Let's Encrypt | HTTPS certificates | Free | $0 |
|---|
| Telegram Bot API | My alerts and the admin bot | Free | $0 |
|---|
| Total | $0 | ||
|---|---|---|---|