They could have got the job done by hosting the service in a vps with a multi-tenant database schema. Instead, they went about learning kubernetes and drillingg deep into "cloud-native" stack. Spent a year trying to setup the perfect devops pipeline.
Not surprisingly the company went out of business within the next few years.
I mean, of the two, the PaaS route certainly burns more money, the exception being the rare shop that is so incompetent they can't even get their own infrastructure configured correctly, like in GP's situation.
There are guaranteed more shops that would be better off self-hosting and saving on their current massive cloud bills than the rare one-offs that actually save so much time using cloud services, it takes them from bankruptcy to being functional.
Does it? Vercel is $20/month and Neon starts at $5/month. That obviously goes up as you scale up, but $25/month seems like a fairly cheap place to start to me.
(I don't work for Vercel or Neon, just a happy customer)
And that’s before you factor in 500gb of storage.