Build a Long-Running Agent in the Cloud for $5.70/Month

How do you run an autonomous AI agent in the cloud 24/7 for just $5.70 a month? I recently wanted to build a background worker with persistent disk storage and an instant web dashboard, but I didn't want the headache of managing a virtual machine or paying a massive monthly bill. If you are building long-running agents, you know this exact cloud hosting dilemma: Standard serverless (like Cloud Run services or Lambda): When traffic stops, the container scales to zero — instantly killing your background loops and wiping your agent's active memory (RAM). On the flip side, a sudden traffic spike spins up multiple containers that can overwrite each other's state files and corrupt your data. (Note: Save state using JSON or Markdown files. Avoid SQLite, as Cloud Run volume mounts ) A regular virtual machine (like EC2 or Compute Engine): Keeps your agent running 24/7, but a standard 1-vCPU machine typically costs $15 to $25 a month even when idle. Even if you use a heavily-throttled fractional VM for $7/month, you are still stuck with the full infrastructure management overhead. Last year, I built a multi-agent Trend Spotter with ADK . It worked well, but I wanted to make it fully autonomous: a continuous, long-running agent that scans and summarizes tech feeds in the background without manual triggers or high hosting costs. Google Cloud's new Cloud Run instances primitive solves this exact problem. It gives you a single, always-on container that runs 24/7, costs $5.70 a month on a shared CPU, provides a free HTTPS endpoint, and lets you mount cloud storage like a normal local disk. Here is how to build and deploy a production long-running agent with this setup (you can follow along with the complete source code in the repo . What are we building? I want to stay up to date with what is happening in AI and agent engineering. But instead of manually opening 20 browser tabs across different websites every morning, I wanted to build my own long-running agent that updates me on