How I hacked multi-cloud high availability for $5/mo (The Financial Firewall)

Most founders fear "the bill" more than "the crash."

I’ve been building Crate.cc to solve both. I just shipped a feature I'm calling Waterfall Routing. Instead of paying for a massive cluster on one provider, the gateway "waterfalls" traffic across different cloud free tiers based on usage thresholds.

The Strategy:

1. Hit the GCP free tier limit.
2. Automatically pivot to Oracle Cloud's free tier.
3. Fall back to an AWS free instance if things get hairy.

Combine that with In-Flight Retries (where the gateway silently fixes 5xx errors by retrying on a different cloud), and you get enterprise-grade uptime on a bootstrap budget.

I'd love to hear how others are managing their infra spend as they scale. Is anyone else "daisy-chaining" free tiers like this?