I run tech at a venture studio (gateway.xyz) and I _rely_ on part time developers.
None of our businesses sell software and none have any full time engineering support. That said, there are lots of little tools that have been custom built to enable the businesses to scale. It's not enough to support full time roles, so I go to part time contractors when I need it.
Weirdly, I struggle to find part-timers with availability! Where have you been looking? I'll make sure I start posting in those places.
I've never used imgix but I find Cloudinary (and specifically the Media Optimizer product) to be extremely reliable, reasonably priced, and as close to zero-maintenance as a thing can be.
We actually switched FROM cloudflare TO cloudinary. CF seemed cheaper, but we found the service, the dashboard, and the service to be wildly erratic. Price went all over the place, we'd get double billed, the dashboard would stop working for a week.
Maybe Cloudinary is more expensive (though not by a lot for our use case) but I can say that nobody has had to log in or think about it for months. The thing just works.
Most of the CF add-on services seem to be hobby-quality. We used to use their video stream/encoding service too but have since switched to another more robust platform.
We have a slack channel, #aws-budget-alerts, where AWS sends a notification any time our forecasted spend reaches certain milestones or the actual spend reaches certain milestones.
Me too! I've normalized it in our organizations. We use a combination of app scripts and what we call "Single Button Apps" that are web pages that have a text box (paste the URL of the Gsheet) and a "go" button. The input and output are all in the sheet, but putting the button in a web app makes it easy to iterate on feature set as/if the application grows. https://blog.adambuilds.com/sba-not-spa-the-most-minimal-ui
What should I make that captures the awesomeness of this project without the insanity? Hmm...