As most have mentioned already: cost We started out with Emvi [1] on Kubernetes at Google Cloud as it was the "fancy thing to use". I like Kubernetes, but we p

As most have mentioned already: cost We started out with Emvi [1] on Kubernetes at Google Cloud as it was the "fancy thing to use". I like Kubernetes, but we paid about 250€/month just to run some web servers and two REST APIs. Which is way too much considering that we're still working on the product and pivoting right now, so we don't have a lot of traffic. We then moved on to use a different cloud provider (Hetzner) and host Kubernetes on VMs. Our costs went down to about 50€ just because of that. And after I got tired managing Kubernetes and all the complexity that comes along with it, we now just use a docker-compose on a single (more powerful) VM, which reduced our cost even futher to about 20€/month and _increased_ performance, as we have less networking overhead. My recommendation is to start out as simple as possible. Probably just a single server, but keep scaling in mind while developing the system. We can still easily scale Emvi on different hardware and move it around as we like. We still use Google Cloud for backups (together with Hetzners own backup system). [1] https://emvi.com/ https://emvi.com/