In my last post about QuackBuilds, I mentioned almost in passing that the long-running half of my stack — schedulers, trading bots, AI pipelines that take longer than serverless function timeouts allow — runs on an Oracle Cloud ARM instance with Coolify on top. A few people asked about that part specifically, so this post is the deeper dive. It’s the corner of my stack that costs me literally nothing per month and quietly does the work that serverless can’t.

The setup makes sense if you’ve ever hit a wall that’s familiar to anyone who’s tried to build something that isn’t a CRUD app. Vercel functions time out. Cloudflare Workers have a CPU budget. Supabase Edge Functions are great until you need to keep a websocket open, run a polling loop, or hold model state in memory across requests.…