the last few weeks I tried getting a small boilerplate going for running fullstack applications for almost free using free tiers of several services (CircleCI, AWS Lambda, etc) and to enable development focused only on the code. Honestly it should have just been inserting a few secrets into the build tool (or commit it, private repos are free and who cares) and being up to speed but that didn't really work out.
I realized that running non-lambda languages is a problem where I usually would have went with Zeit Now's Serverless Docker, but that seems a non option and the best way I'd do it if I was willing to spend money was a AWS Fargate Terraform file but, not everyone can (and wants) to use that for simple prototyping.
So my question to you all is: How would you architect an infrastructure to enable quick prototyping for nearly no cost? The nearly no cost is important for me as I know a lot of developers who can't even afford the 5$ it costs f.e. to run a AWS EC2 instance and aren't even versed with it.
Working locally is always nice obviously but there are waaaaay too many tutorials that speak of "production ready" and are "ssh into vps, git pull and docker run" at best.
PoV from me: If you are versed enough to quickly provision your infrastructure within a single VPS (or what it takes you) you are already good enough and should get paid a developer salary that spending 50 bucks a month for a managed service won't kill you or 10 bucks if you are doing more of the work yourself (which is learning too! But not the goal of this).