[alien_]

The initial question was about side projects, that may or may not need to scale but often run at pennies monthly.

Hopefully someday the side project launches and makes it to the first page of HackerNews or ProductHunt and then you need to cope with insane amounts of (mostly junk) traffic, which can be hard if you just happen to have a $5 VPS, so you're likely to fail your launch.

At sustained scale serverless solutions can be very expensive indeed, but that's a great problem to have for a side project.

Large organizations or established projects would likely be an order of magnitude cheaper to run their compute on EC2, maybe with RIs or spot or a combination of these (or their equivalents on other cloud/VPC providers), or even on bare metal if the usage patterns are sufficiently flat.