What serverless can’t do — running long-lived services for $0 with Oracle Cloud and Coolify

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