I am a pretty basic user, I have started using k8s on this project as a learning and 100$ was too much for the learning price, but now on DO I get a similar cluster for less than half of GKE price and I feel like it is worth it, considering all the simplicity and observability of deployments. Also, DO allows me to select regions without any price difference, so I was able to select Amsterdam to get 10 times better latency from where I live. My setup is quite basic, my app with aroud 8-10 pods, + additional stuff such as cert-manager and prometheus.
YMMV, but so far I am really happy with DO's offering, both in terms of performance, simplicity and performance. I am not a power user and definitely operate at no scale, but using DO in general is much simpler than using GCP with GKE.
First, the biggest problem I see is the huge vendor lock-in you accept with the PaaS offerings such as AWS EBS or GCP App Engine. When you commit to one of these platforms, it is really hard to get out of it; it requires engineering effort to move to another provider and feature parity between the providers for your application to be supported. Plus, you get to learn platform-specific stuff which has no standards across providers. Plus, it is usually slow and bloated; have you ever tried deploying something to EBS? It takes at least five minutes without any meaningful information about what is going on or if your deployment succeeded.
Second, the tooling you get is usually very small compared to what Kubernetes ecosystem has. Each and every platform ask you to use their own tools, but there is a high possibility that the tools don't fit your usecase, or you may need to modify your workflow. With a solution like k8s, you only need to support the standard, which is k8s itself roughly, and you are free to use whatever tooling you want.
Third, done right, Kubernetes allows you to move to another provider very easily without changing a single line of code in your Kubernetes definitions or your application. You define the desired state of your cluster, you check in all these stuff into your VCS, and since k8s forces you to do these stuff from the beginning, at the end you usually have a nice, reproducible system that is more or less cloud agnostic. You have logging, horizontal scalability, isolation, easy deployments, easy rollbacks and all that stuff. I have migrated from GKE to DO's Kubernetes offering without changing a single line in my Kubernetes definitions or my application. Of course, my usecase is very very very small compared to most of people around here, but that was my experience.
FWIW, I think Kubernetes is still a good learning to understand about current state of infrastructure, deployments and the ideal state we all try to achieve. Whether or not a business should depend on it is a whole another topic.
There's no strong vendor lock-in either, buildpacks and backend services are much of a muchness across Dokku, Herokuish, Flynn, Cloud Foundry etc. If your app is 12-factor with externalised state, you're plain sailing with most PaaS and simple docker setups, or at least I don't get what K8s brings to the table in terms of operational simplicity.
When you say dashboard, which dashboard do you mean? Happy to look at it. Thanks again for the feedback.