Some excellent VPS deals with high storage here. Host has a good rep on LET. Believe these promos are ending soon and many are sold out in any case, but I think they have some stock in a few of them..

https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/199617/hostbrr-bf-storage-...

Dreamhost shared unlimited is good for this I think. 3,95 - After 3 years the price triples but still worth it. Unlimited traffic, bandwidth, emails and subdomains.

https://www.dreamhost.com/hosting/shared/#shared-plans

Some options that pop up frequently on HN: Vultr, DigitalOcean, OVH and Hetzner Cloud, all have cheap VPSes, $4-$5 per month for the cheapest I think. And usually if it's an app for just you/your small family, you can get away hosting multiple apps per VPS without suffering atrocious performance (depends on the apps/usage obviously).

The trick (and somewhat the drawback in many's eyes) is to rent a VPS (or dedicated/bare metal) instead of a "App hosting service" (what Render is). You'd need to know some basics about infrastructure and networking, but not anything too advanced and that's stuff will be useful regardless too, so not too easy to rationalize away :)