I am a one-person team running Kubernetes on Google Cloud. It costs around $62 per month before tax. (One n1-standard-1 node for $35.34 per month, HTTP Load Balancing $18.60 per month and SSD persistent disks for $8.50 per month). Kubernetes gives me the ability to scale up quickly when the need comes (which is soon, hopefully).

I evaluated AWS Fargate & Kubernetes, Azure and GKE before settling on GKE. Amazon charges $148 per month just for cluster management alone. Google and Azure charge $0 for cluster management. This ruled out AWS for me. AWS appears to be a reluctant adopter of Kubernetes. They seem to want you to use Fargate instead. I tried it and found it to be crap--very hard to get things running.

I was able to get Kubernetes running on Azure and GKE fairly easily. There were minor hiccups on both those clouds. With Azure initial creation of a AKS cluster failed because some of the resource providers weren't "registered" on my subscription. On GKE it was hard to get ingress working. Static IPs take a long time to take effect, and in the mean time you are fiddling with your yaml files trying to figure out what you may have done wrong, not realizing it is a GKE issue.

The awesome part of Kubernetes is that I didn't need to learn almost anything about Google cloud to get everything working. I only had to learn Kubernetes. If Google raises prices I can easily switch to Azure without learning any Azure technologies. My knowledge as well as my application is completely portable. I can't imagine doing any of this as a one-person team without Kubernetes.