Every developer wants the same thing: a free way to run small backend tasks. A webhook for a side project. A contact form handler. An OG image generator. A small proxy to hide an API key. Things that handle a few hundred requests a week. They do not need a $20/month server, an Azure Function App you will forget about next month, or a new Lambda that takes an hour to set up.

I have had this problem for years. Most of my work is in .NET shops — AWS for production, Azure for clients on the Microsoft stack. Both are great for real workloads. Both feel like overkill when the actual task is "send me an email when a Stripe customer pays."

Last weekend I needed exactly that webhook. Spinning up a new Function App for one endpoint felt silly. Adding it to an existing production API would mix two unrelated things — the next person reading the code would wonder why a billing handler was sitting inside the customer-facing app.…