Students ship a URL on day one, without a credit card

The web course used to spend its final week on deployment: forty Heroku signups, forty credit-card prompts, forty students learning that the free tier had been retired.

Now a student runs python app.py on port 5000 in their container, and the port is already …-http-5000.… with a certificate. No EXPOSE, no tunnel, no account on a third platform. They text the URL to a parent before the lecture is over.

Forty students' apps live on one $29 bare metal box the course rents. Nobody's app costs anything extra; the twelfth, the thirtieth, the fortieth all fit inside the same flat rate. Idle apps share their disk blocks and cost nothing to keep alive through the summer.

Deployment stops being week twelve and becomes the first command that listens.