AWS was the first place I looked, but the pricing is pretty confusing so I'm not sure how I would guarantee that costs would stay below a certain amount. It also seems like there are a number of similar options to look at and it's not clear to me which is best - EC2, Fargate, Beanstalk, App Runner...

Google Cloud also has a few options, the main two I'm aware of are Cloud Run and App Engine. Main concern here is again the potential for unintended costs. I've seen horror stories like "We Burnt $72K testing Firebase + Cloud Run and almost went Bankrupt" [1]. Of course that's a fairly novel outcome, but it shouldn't even be in the cards that charges exceed my intended cap.

I've heard good things here and elsewhere about DigitalOcean droplets and Render.com but is it really $20+/mo for just 2gb of RAM? Not sure how much RAM I actually need though and the 512MB for the starter / free tiers might be fine.

I've also heard a lot of praise for Heroku, though also that it's been slowly going cold since getting acquired by Salesforce.

I've also heard people suggest just renting a dedicated server from places like https://www.hetzner.com/, https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/index.xml, or https://lowendbox.com/, though that seems like a good deal more work that I'm looking for as someone with minimal devops experience.

Right now I'm planning on just starting with the free tier for Render.com since that also seems like a convenient way to setup a cheap/simple Postgres instance. Would otherwise go the same route with Heroku or DigitalOcean.

Are there any options I didn't consider here? Anyone else have hobby/POC/low-scale Spring Boot deployments and like their setup?

[1] https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/