Looks like web hosting or a mail server is completely out of the question.
*Or really just shared hosting w/ containers running Raspbian on standard server hardware with a nice onboarding workflow for migrating from a real Pi would likely be sufficient for most people's use-cases—if you're not using peripherals I imagine you don't have any need for the real time OS features?
I have even spent more and used e.g. Asus Pi-compatible boards and it was always a dumpster fire - the last one I picked up was advertised as supporting 4K output, but getting it to actually work was beyond my capability, and when it did work, was topping out at 10 FPS. Writing to support ended up being a waste of time, all I ever got was vague answers as to why it should work without any actual solutions.
"Substantially cheaper and more energy efficient" - 9W max is already quite low[0] and cheaper? Pi devices are already pretty cheap, and the money goes to a good cause as opposed to cheap knock-offs where the money goes where? Also the cheaper you go, the less support you will probably receive. As noted by the link, StackExchange has a dedicated site just for Raspberry Pi questions. Good luck getting even close to the same level of information about any compatible boards, which probably cut corners by using sketchy hardware which may or may not be be patched in the future in their forked distro.
[0] https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/114239/pi-4-...
It may not work if you're running a tor node, depending on how cloudfront deals with them, but it does work for mostly-reliable dns resolution on a non-static, residential isp connection.
Not negating the project, just offering an alternative for people that want a static ip without renting vps/metal and without the isp static upcharge.
How do you think Cloudfront works? Amazon is just selling you a bunch of VMs pre-configured as load balancers.
Not trying to be a jerk here, but the cloud has really caused otherwise smart people to lose a grasp on reality.
I have a script that updates the dns record on a free tier plan with Cloudflare, and since traffic passes through them I can open my residential network to only ports 80 and 443 from their ip4/6 addresses.