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A Few Free Money Glitches for You and Your Agents

5 min read
AI AgentsGitHub ActionsCloudflarePostHogDeveloper Tools

Free and cheap software tiers designed as acquisition funnels for human developers in the Before Times now look like exploits in the age of agents. Give an individual or small team a useful allowance, let their usage grow with the company, and eventually sell them more capacity—and the adjacent products that came with it.

Agents break that model. One developer with a fleet of agents now consumes infrastructure like a team or enterprise, making cheap and free-tier resources that once made sense only at business scale practical not just for one-human businesses, but for anyone side-vibing experiments and hobby projects. They can extract the full value of the cheap or free tier, source everything beyond the subsidized slice elsewhere (or stop there), and never grow into the customer the pricing assumed.

Here are three prime examples available to individual developers.

GitHub Enterprise Cloud

Are you and your agents burning through the 2,000 Actions minutes included with a free GitHub account every month?

Well, you could pay $4 a month to get 3,000 GitHub Actions minutes with the Pro upgrade.

Or you could shell out $21 a month and get 50,000 with a GitHub Enterprise Cloud upgrade.

Is $21 for 50,000 Actions minutes worth it?

At GitHub's standard two-core Linux rate of $0.006 per minute, that 50,000-minute allotment would cost roughly $300 à la carte.

Now, you might think that to start a GitHub Enterprise account you need to be a business. Like own an LLC, have an EIN, have multiple members, etc.

You don't. You can just do it yourself.

GitHub lets organization owners upgrade to an Enterprise account themselves.

Oh, and by the way, Copilot code reviews now consume that same Actions allowance.

Cloudflare's Free Developer Cloud

Basically Cloudflare's free offerings are a wet dream for anyone building small and self-hosted projects.

Their collection of generous top-of-funnel products amounts to a small application platform. It includes:

  • Workers include 100,000 requests per day. Use them to run APIs, webhooks, scheduled jobs, or an entire small backend at the edge.
  • R2 includes 10 GB-month of object storage, one million Class A operations, ten million Class B operations, and free internet egress. Use it for images, user uploads, backups, or downloadable assets.
  • D1 includes five million rows read and 100,000 rows written per day, plus 5 GB of storage. Use it as the SQL database behind a small app—for users, settings, content, or job state.
  • Cloudflare Tunnel is available on every plan. Use it to put a home server or local app online without exposing a public IP or opening inbound ports.
  • Cloudflare Pages includes 500 builds per month, unlimited static requests, and unlimited preview deployments. Use it to host static sites and front ends with a preview deployment for every branch or pull request.

How do you price the free money here? It's a bit muddled, but here are some numbers for a few of these.

R2 has a clean-ish à la carte comparison: its free storage and operation allowances total about $8.25 a month at the posted Standard rates. Workers Paid starts at $5 a month and Pages Pro at $20 a month billed annually, but both bundle much larger limits. Tunnel has no separate price, and D1's paid allowances are too different for an honest conversion.

PostHog

PostHog is an all-in-one product and engineering analytics platform: it shows you how people use your software, what went wrong, and how changes affect behavior.

Like Cloudflare, its free tier is a constellation rather than one product, and includes:

  • One million product analytics events to measure what people do inside your app.
  • 5,000 session recordings to watch where users get stuck.
  • One million feature-flag requests to test and gradually roll out changes.
  • 100,000 exceptions for application error tracking.
  • 100,000 AI-observability events and 50 GB of logs to inspect agents, LLM calls, and application behavior.
  • Data warehouse capacity, workflows, surveys, and 500 PostHog AI credits every month.

A few years ago, one developer would have needed months to build enough software to exercise all those products. Agents let one person ship, instrument, test, observe, and revise several applications at once.

The Glitch Is Utilization

None of these free money glitches require fake accounts, hidden exploits, or workloads that violate the providers' terms of service. Whether or not it was the explicit pricing assumption, these allowances grew up in a world where human attention and ability tempered consumption.

Agents remove that governor.

GitHub and Cloudflare are probably the most durable examples above. They are established companies using these allowances to pull developers into much larger platforms. The exact quotas may change, but the basic bargain probably will not.

I'm especially betting GitHub's bargain survives—because, thankfully, it's owned by Microsoft.

In the age of agents, a free or cheap tier is infrastructure one person can now use at company scale.

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