I get frustrated that people seem pretty aware of the enshittification and centralization of large services, but when an indie vendor pops up that can fill a niche, people expect it to have all the bells and whistles of a billion dollar company and also give everything away for free.
If you have a just for fun website, then yeah, hop around the free tiers of whatever hosting service. If you're running any kind of online business, the difference between free and 9€/month for web hosting is a rounding error to pretty much any other business expenses you have.
Also, keep in mind that on the 9€/month plan, that's the max you pay. With Vercel, Netlify, Firebase, etc., if you get hit with a bot attack, they come after you for $100k+ and you have to beg on social media for them to call off the collectors.[0]
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1b14bty/netlify_jus...