They have GPU-backed servers too, obviously theyre more expensive, and not ideal for your usecase maybe.
Modal is a good serverless alternative if you want to scale to zero and be able to handle spiky loads.
There have been plenty of stories just on HN about this. Not a place I'd choose to host anything important.
Edit: Not sure if I misread, or if you edited, but I see you addressed this, and yes in that case sounds like this would be a good option if that kind of price range is ok.
But you really have to do the calculus, as you buy their cheapest servers for at least a month at a time. And with fluctuating loads, a serverless approach might actually be better.
See also: replicate or runpod. But I like modal best; their SDK is pretty comprehensive and has a sane developer experience, replicate is too constrained and runpod instances were unavailable for me half the time...
VPS providers like Vultr and Digital Ocean are a little more expensive but a little easier in some cases. They’re still way cheaper than big cloud.
The sign up was smooth and easy.
I looked at the raw footage, it was about 45 hours total. So roughly a working week. You can certainly do it faster, I was not rushing and included unnecessary features. There was also plenty of non-CI/CD stuff in that recording.
So yes, I consider this to be trivial. There is so much open source software to lean on these days that does practically everything for you. There are even ready-made k8s distributions (k3s) that will do more in an arguably more standardized way.
People are afraid of it because platforms like AWS/Vercel/etc have coddled them and made them think this stuff is magic. It's just systems, you can do it.