Would a cloud provider be in the option at all? Zepl is pretty cheap, althoug not jupyter. Stuff like Google cloud managed notebooks are also pretty cheap, you

Would a cloud provider be in the option at all? Zepl is pretty cheap, althoug not jupyter. Stuff like Google cloud managed notebooks are also pretty cheap, you can create a template, and one-click on demand create, kill it at the end of the day. There is an option for 7 cent/hour per user. 5 hours = roughly 50 cent, so above your budget but soo easy from a management point of view. And infinitely scalable. You could also start messing indeed by just installing it on a cloud server and only turning it on for those 5 hours you actually need it. And if you still want to install yourselves, look at tlhj (the littlest jupyter hub). We use that succesfully internally, but it takes a few hours to get everything configured the way you like it. Sill a lot better than actually installing a proper jupyter server imo.