Well this seems like kind of a big deal – Moodle HQ announced MoodleCloud this morning at Moodle Moot AU 2015.
They may not be the first LMS provider to make their platform freely available (ad supported) – Blackboard did this a while ago – but honestly, who wants to use that?
For your money (zero) you get a full Moodle install that can support up to 50 users and which includes 200MB of data storage. It also includes the Big Blue Button virtual classroom tool.
Signing up was a breeze and is cleverly linked to phone numbers rather than email addresses.
You get access to the new shiny Moodle 2.9 instance but are restricted to the core set of plugins and themes. (Which are still pretty great)