One thing that I don't want to take too much time (but probably will anyway) for these projects is deployment. I went ahead and containerized what I've written so far for this project so when it comes time to deploy I can just use docker compose.
I know there are plenty of solutions like Heroku or Digital Ocean App Platform that are supposed to make this whole process easier. The thing is I don't want to have to pay for every service separately since each is barely going to be used. This way I can stick all my projects' docker containers on a little $5/month VM and scale that as needed.