I'm not sure if it's worth going any lower than $24/month

If I were to run my own personal instance of this that cost would be quite high. A free Oracle Cloud VM or $5 Digital Ocean droplet would be the way I go.

A free Oracle Cloud VM still costs you your soul, in perpetuity.

That can't be right, some of us have worked for IBM and no longer have souls.

IBM and Oracle have a soul-sharing deal signed.

They went to court over it and depending on the number of CPUs you use you might be forced to have one or two kids to pay the extra souls.

Yeah, I think that "or two" in "one or two kids" is still being litigated. My reading is that it'll stay in litigation indefinitely, as this is the price both companies agreed to pay when they decided to retain lawyers from Hell itself.

Well, of course. “$24 per month seems high for running my own personal instance that’s going to do a handful of notifications daily” vs “$24 per month seems high for running a public service that could very easily need to be scaled up quickly” are two very different statements.

If I go by $50/hour salary on average for developer, if someone saves 20 minutes per month on average using AWS, it is worth it.

If it's a single EC2 instance and not using any other AWS services, I fail to see the difference between Hetzner, DigitalOcean or AWS.

That being said, it's probably not worth migrating to another provider at this point.

I only have experience with Digital ocean and AWS. AWS free support is definitely much better than Digital Ocean. Also Digital Ocean is more quicker to delete your data than AWS in case of billing issue or anything.

Except where worth it in dollars < worth it in hassle

Would the $5 droplet scale (and charge appropriately) if their specified bandwidth is exceeded?

I mean from 24 to 10 is a big difference.