A working demo with a shareable URL is worth far more in a portfolio or a hackathon submission than a project that only runs on your laptop. You don't need a paid server to get there.
A realistic free-tier path
- Containerise the app (a simple Dockerfile) so it runs the same locally and on any host.
- Deploy the backend to a free-tier platform that supports Python web services — most have a sleep-after-inactivity limit, which is fine for a demo.
- Use a managed free-tier database (Postgres or similar) rather than a local file, so state survives a redeploy.
- Put secrets in the platform's environment-variable settings, never committed to the repo.
The trade-offs to expect
Free tiers usually cold-start after inactivity — the first request after a while is slow. That's an acceptable trade for zero cost on a student project, but tell reviewers or judges to expect it rather than let them think the app is broken.
See environment variables and config for AI apps for the secrets-handling half of this.
GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).
Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
