[artdigital]

I run my private stuff on a hosted vultr k8s cluster with 1 node for $10-$20 a month. All my hobby stuff is running on that "personal cluster" and it is that perfect sweetspot for me that you're talking about

I don't use ingresses or loadbalancers because those cost extra, and either have the services exposed through tailscale (with tailscale operator) for stuff I only use myself, or through cloudflare argo tunnels for stuff I want internet accessible

(Once a project graduates and becomes more serious, I migrate the container off this cluster and into a proper container runner)