That appears to be the best option for my use cases. Although I'm not sure if that makes pricing worse or better. :P
I host two different RNAseq and NGS data exploration shiny apps on a 2GB DO droplet and it works pretty well. Shiny-server is sort of a pain in the ass though, and I agree the documentation sucks
I don't know, but maybe you can run shiny on red hats free plan of openshift online: