Zero-Cost API Infrastructure: Running a DaaS Business on an Idle Server

I Had a Server Doing Nothing 22 Hours a Day I run quantitative trading bots — one for the Korean stock market, one for the US market, one for crypto. They sit on AWS and GCP, watching for signals, executing trades, then going back to sleep. Most of the time, these servers are idle. And AWS isn't free forever — once the 12-month free tier expired, I was looking at ~$10/month for a t2.micro doing almost nothing for most of the day. So I asked myself: what if the idle server could pay for itself? The Idea: Data-as-a-Service on RapidAPI I'm not a professional developer. My background is in IT architecture — I understand systems, infrastructure, and data flows. But I'd never built an API from scratch before. What changed was AI-assisted development. With vibe coding (writing in natural language, letting AI generate the code), I could suddenly build things that would have taken me months to learn the traditional way. I needed a product that: Runs on the same server as my trading bots without