I've always been pretty cheap with my spendings on VPS. So, when building my web applications, even if the traffic is building up, I opted into optimizing before upgrading hardware.

I've been doing this for more than 10 years and I've been making incremental (sometimes really small) improvements to the way my web apps work so that I rarely need to go down to AWS, k8s, load balancer etc etc way.

Sure, these are personal projects and of course there is a diminishing return on optimizing (so I do upgrade hardware when I need to), but I always found it a rewarding challenge to first look at understanding the inherent issue, rather than just throwing money at it (at my work, it's completely opposite - see an issue? throw money and upgrade hardware ASAP and move on).

Some things I've done for optimizing are...

- Simple upgrading of software - going to latest postgres, upgrading PHP - Identifying data that are not frequently updated and then caching them - I've identified some bot traffics coming from China, so for one of my projects, I just blocked it completely (yeah, drastic I know, but not worth my $2!!)

There are also many many services out there that provide free tiers that you can utilize. So as a solo, indie dev, there are many ways to leverage to stay on a cheap $5 linode box as long as you need (I saw recently a box for $2.50 - tempting...)