To be fair, if you application was designed with Kubernetes in mind, the scale where you can make use of it starts a lot smaller. When paying ~6k$ in servers, y

To be fair, if you application was designed with Kubernetes in mind, the scale where you can make use of it starts a lot smaller. When paying ~6k$ in servers, you're way past the point where adding it would noticeably impact your bill. As I outlined in my other response, it does not make sense to make the switch in this case (IMO). But if I were to design an application at this scale and the team would have sufficient knowledge in Kubernetes, I'd definitely consider deploying to a cluster - the overhead could be quickly countered by development speed and fail safety, especially when choosing something simpler like k3s. But I agree that it's definitely not needed here, that scale is a few orders of magnitude away.