> especially early on when my focus should be testing my product, not optimizing my could infrastructure for scale that might never be needed.

In that case, go with managed services like render, Heroku, or fly. MRSK, or any DIY deployment, is not going to save you the hours of tinkering you will inevitably do to get the non-server stuff up for even a low-usage production app: 1. One-click Deploys, basic CI/CD 2. Redis/memcache 3. Database / migrations / rollback / backup 4. Logging / metrics / down detection & basic high availability 5. Keeping up with basic upgrades