Just use railway.app - free tier just works and you can deploy a sample app on a free account in seconds. It will give you a general idea of how Heroku works.
> It no longer makes sense for me to run weekend projects on AWS outright, thats really for large enterprise applications.
depending on the type of site, cf workers is ridiculous value. single button availability of your content in every corner of the world and you wont pay a dime