Thanks for the info - I have some similar use cases.

How has the Postgres DB worked out for you with Render? I've been weary of using a relational DB in general since it's a single point of failure and really disruptive if your instance goes down (even with a back-up DB to failover too can be problematic if data doesn't get replicated before a crash).

Also are you just using your Node.js app as a back-end server or are you also serving web pages from it?