My open source service, lrclib.net, handles approximately 200 requests per second at peak (yes you read that right, it's approximately 12000 requests per minute) on a simple €13 Hetzner cloud server (4 AMD based VCPU, 8GB RAM). I'd love to write a blog post about how I made it possible sometime in the future, but basically, I cheated by using Rust together with SQLite3 and some caching.

I was surprised by the cost of Vercel in that blog post too, which is why I dislike all kinds of serverless/lambda/managed services. For me, having a dozen people subscribing to $1-$2/month sponsorship on GitHub Sponsors is enough to cover all the costs. Even if no one donates, I’d still have no trouble keeping the project running on my own.