As the developer of this system, I concur with this; Protomaps is focused on map tiles, and can be used with other solutions such as http://geocode.earth for search.

A small detail: I don't believe this is the absolute cheapest way to deliver map tiles. Renting an unmetered bandwidth server is always going to be the cheapest way to host content, but unmanaged servers don't give you SSL termination, infinite storage, or an edge cache.

Protomaps is designed as the right compromise between self-hosted operational+development costs and SaaS-like delivery.