I start using Kubernetes with gitlab months ago with the free account. Today i'm using it for a side project. I never used kubectl since then. the project is very simple but still it is split into 3 different repos (all connected to the same cluster). Even if the documentation is not clear about how to connect different repos to the same cluster, after a couple of hours i had to click some buttons in the gitlab interface and auto devops is enabled in 3 projects.
in office we do not work with docker, containers, cloud etc, we run legacy asp.net 2.0 on-premise without any kind of automation (just a couple of us coordinating the releases and copying and pasting into the customer Windows Server 2008).
Kubernetes for personal projects? In my case, after 10 years of on-premise deployments, VM Ware, SQL Clusters, web.config, IIS, ARR and the rest of the things related, YES!
I absolutely want 3 hosts for less then 100$, a gitlab account for 4$, a free account in cloudflare, code and deploy.