Not Every Workload Belongs on a Free Server: Red Flags and Exit Criteria
The review passed. The deployment failed. An engineer moved a code-review agent to a free server. The model answered correctly in every test. Then the server hit its quota at 2:47 PM on day three. Fourteen pull request verdicts vanished with the session. No state. No logs. No retry. This is the reviewer's blind spot. Teams test models obsessively. They rarely test the runtime underneath. This guide covers one decision: refusing a free server for an agent. It lists red flags, better alternatives, and exit criteria. It also names a concrete example: MonkeyCode's free model access and free server option. Disclosure: This article was prepared as part of MonkeyCode's product outreach. What "free" actually includes MonkeyCode is an open-source agent platform. It offers free model access and a free server option. The free model access includes 10 million tokens per cycle, per the project's published claim. The free server runs the agent without a paid VM. Those offers are real. They are also constraints. Free infrastructure is a budget, not a promise. Treat it like a trial environment, not a production contract. Free tiers exist to convert users, not to run production. That is fine. The mistake is treating them as infrastructure. Three failure modes Free infrastructure fails in predictable ways. Know all three before committing. Mode one: quota exhaustion. Token budgets reset on a schedule. Heavy days burn the whole cycle. The failure is silent. The agent stops mid-task. Mode two: state loss. Free servers restart without warning. In-memory sessions disappear. Long-running agents lose context. Recovery is manual. Mode three: contention. Shared resources mean cold starts. Neighbors consume CPU. Rate limits appear at peak hours. Latency becomes a random variable. Red flags: check before committing Run this checklist before any migration. One red flag means pause. Two mean stop. Hard deadlines. The agent gates CI or on-call responses. A quota reset cannot wait. Daily burn exce