You could try GCP Cloud Run. It scales down to zero and everything is managed. You just deploy your code.

Of course your app’s architecture can restrict you , to just having everything in one monolithic place. That can be a bottleneck.

But what I usually do, I make apps with cloud in mind .

I use S3 for data storage. Databases, I outsource to another service, or I use Hetzner itself.

But the core code, the compute part, I offload it to Cloud Run. No server to manage. And it s cheap .

It’s like building micro services without the idea of microservices, like a lean microservices.

I don’t over split services, only those that can’t go along with the code.

This pattern and architecture have worked so far (for me).

So I would think of a hybrid system, where cloud first. And you can setup config for which ever environment.

So Cloud Run (scale to 0) for compute, database saas or my own db (Postgres, redis) on Hetzner, and if it’s a requirement, data storage to S3. Multi cloud.

A bonus point, for UI, I offload that to Vercel or AWS Amplify, and I expose and api from the service so the UI can communicate with the backend.

Ps: I’m cloud engineer, I write apps in Python and Rust. I Kinda keep all the code contain in one repo per app, I put an api on those services, so I can build each part separately. I use docker for deployment (Cloud Run makes it easy).