Our project started on a free Heroku tier (which funnily enough, to this day, is the reason our DB is postgres), but quickly outgrew that and I heard horror sto

Our project started on a free Heroku tier (which funnily enough, to this day, is the reason our DB is postgres), but quickly outgrew that and I heard horror stories about how quickly it got expensive. We then switched to the cheapest Hetzner tier, which was just astoundingly cheap and performed very well for two years or so. Eventually we had to upgrade and are now paying EUR 5 for an instance that's probably beefier than we need. All of this is backed by Dokku (haven't found a use case for k8s yet, single-machine is good enough for now). Be interesting to see what happens if we ever wanted to scale horizontally, but there's quite a few Hetzner instances we can scale to vertically, before needing to go horizontal I think. We also used some other 'free' services, like Netlify for hosting the static sites our product spits out, but we found that they have a lot of hidden (and surprisingly expensive) costs, like form handling. Those costs add up quickly. Ended up going with Cloudflare for that, which delivers a lot on their free tier (and less worrying about getting DDosed by something like HN).