We talked about running a Pelias geocoder AMI back at Mapzen, and it still might make sense today. I'd be really interested to hear how it works out for you.

My personal feeling is that developers are irrationally averse to paying for someone else to set up and reliably run software for them, but that it's usually a massively good deal to pay for that service.

Even a simple software project that takes an hour a month to keep running is well worth most companies paying $100/month to not have to worry about, for example.