[p_l]

I found personally a lot of use for k8s in the "10 QPS" bracket, especially if you can afford to use GKE & CloudRun (but recently I managed similar setup with single hetzner dedicated server and k3s).

Specifically, the simplicity of managing things once you go through the initial pain of setting it up (much reduced with GKE), cost savings from bin packing your apps (not just your product but also anything else you need for your company that you can't afford SaaS for [1]). You can share servers for dev/test/prod till you get enough clients to migrate up. And as much as I love HAproxy, configuring it is way more annoying than dealing with some basic ingress controller + certmanager (+ optional external-dns, not needed if you just set a wildcard).

Right now I have a super cheap (compared to cloud) hetzner server which provides (using k3s) services to multiple clients, ranging from just VPN (using headscale) to handling git etc. All with SSO, low maintenance, etc.

[1] costs of SaaS service per employee hit differently when you're not VC backed and you're not based in the United States.In my experience it's often cheaper to get another full time engineer to handle some self hosting than pay for various cloud/SaaS/PaaS.