Working on a consumer SaaS startup and I strongly disagree. A virtual machine on something like DigitalOcean does not provide any of the nice abstractions that something like a Google Cloud Run (or similar on AWS/Azure) provides. The amount of time a cloud provider can save you administratively is difficult to exaggerate. That is from day 1. Should your startup succeed, and you need to scale, the real savings start to kick in since scaling to a large degree is handled for you. Good luck re-architecting your app into a kubernetes cluster and handling load balancing manually while your competition gets all that with almost no effort.