If you're going the kube route, I would go with GKE with pre-emptible nodes. You can have a single micro base node ($25/month), and then an auto-scaling, pre-emptible pool for a discount of 80%/month vs spot prices on AWS/GCP. There's not a lot for you to do once you set it up. With pre-emptible the nodes will on average be unavailable 5-10% of the month, but typically not at the same time.

There are cheaper baseload alternatives appearing, but it'll probably be 12 months until they're stable.

https://labs.ovh.com/kubernetes-k8s

https://github.com/hetznercloud/hcloud-cloud-controller-mana...