Wondering if for small/bootstrapped projects there's any alternative people suggest? Fly has a nice UX and accessible prices, but it's unstable at best. I use the big clouds at work, but for personal they are $$$. Also I want to keep devops tending asymptotically to zero.

Honestly these days I am leaning towards this approach: https://github.com/mrsked/mrsk/

It's all just docker.