Originally published on AIdeazz — cross-posted here with canonical link. My Oracle Cloud bill for the last 12 months has been $0.00. This isn't a marketing stunt, it's a hard number. We run 10 production AI agents, processing hundreds of thousands of requests monthly. Our Groq bill for the same period was $12.48. Claude API? $8.17. Resend for email notifications? $4.00. These are the visible costs. The invisible ones, the "free tier" traps, and the operational overhead are where most AI st...