Looking at linode, those prices get you an instance with 1Gb of ram and a mediocre CPU. So you are running all of your applications on that?

Personal projects/MVPs/small projects? Absolutely. For what I'm running, there's no reason to need anything beyond that.

The point is, I used to just throw everything up on a PaaS. Heroku/Render, etc. and pay way more than I needed to, even if I had 0 users, lol.

For $3.5, Hetzner gives 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 40 GB SSD, and 10 TB of bandwidth.