tihal

Hi all, I am trying to get some side hustles started lately and want to min-max my cost and effort while doing so (broke college student already working 20h per week). For one of my apps I use payload as the CMS since it is the only cms which is real OSS without locking away core features like strapi and all the other cash-grab "freemium" CMS vendors do. Today the team released their cloud service starting at 35$ per month but I can get a VPS of similar specs at around 20$/month. So my question: Do you think self-hosting is generally worth 15 bucks a month? How much hours per month should I consider for self hosting when making my decision? Is just a backend really worth 35$? How much do you guys pay for your CMS/backend?