I've hosted a few services on the Oracle Free Tier for over a year and it worked great, until my instance disappeared and I couldn't get it back again due to no capacity on Oracle. I've read of this happening to a lot to others too.

The free tier will cost you less (in time, power consumption, hardware etc) but consider you may end up losing access to those services.

Either way be sure to keep backups of anything important that you would be sad to lose.

I've moved to self-hosting. I started on a raspberry pi 4 for months and eventually upgraded to something a bit more robust. There is a lot to be said about controlling your own hardware but it may end up costing a little more initially than even paying for a VPS.