Some people don't even earn $10,000 per year, so that's probably an exaggeration. I agree that it'd be unreasonable to spend a year or even months looking for w

Some people don't even earn $10,000 per year, so that's probably an exaggeration. I agree that it'd be unreasonable to spend a year or even months looking for ways to save money, but if it's a few simple choices that you can make while researching what to use, it would probably be worth it! Besides, if you intend to keep a project alive, it makes sense to minimize the expenses that it'll passively incur. The choice between using SaaS platforms (any of the managed DB services, Auth0 etc.), PaaS platforms (like Heroku), the big IaaS vendors (AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba) and just hosting most of those yourself in something like Docker containers on cheap VPSes (think Hetzner, OVH, Contabo or Time4VPS) can result in an order of magnitude less or more expenditures.