Maintainers should be given the tools to monetise their projects using a cloud offering early on so they don't burn out on the way to learning what control plane/data plane nomenclature actually is!

Unfortunately there are limited tools/resources out there to answer the question "how can i build a cloud deployment option for my open source project" without 25 layers of abstractions. This is why open-source projects end up raising millions of dollars (e.g strapi, appsmith just off the top of my head). All this money just for all these companies to essentially build the same thing.

Ideally, there should be a service/tool (maybe thenile will be it) where I answer a few questions.

Containerised? Stateful? Long lived? Keep alive? Allow end users to deploy many instances? % premium per instance over cloud costs? License per instance? Pricing (tiered, volume, stairstep?) On end customer's own infra? Min resources per instance. Airgapped per user/airgapped per instance/all instances running on same cloud? Instance management API? Update strategy? Big Green button to update all instances at once?

And it should spit out a ready to deploy setup where I can start monetising my open-source project while concentrating on maintaining the project.

If the above exists then congrats, you disrupted the main reason for open source projects raising millions of dollars.