DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

I don't know if I would call them the 'best', but Kamatera offers pretty good bandwidth, 5TB/mo or 50MB/s unbounded at $4 (for non-dedicated allocation, $9/mo for dedicated). I don't know if I'd call them the best because I don't really need much more than something that's reliable and has decent speed, which it satisfies pretty well.

To give some hobbyist level price increase numbers:

I'm currently running two basic droplets at 8gb RAM and 4vCPU, which is basically just enough resources for a proper dev kubernetes cluster with Promethueus, Loki, 5-6 apps, etc (4gb 4vCPU is not enough, I tried). I also run a third 1gb1vcpu management droplet outside the cluster as well as a load balancer in front of my API gateway and a spaces instance to dump backups and store stuff like terraform state. My previous bill was $102 and it looks like it will now under this new pricing with all of the above be about $125 which is about 20% increase.

Are there similar managed kubernetes offerings out there that are better on price? My understanding is that I could probably half this or even do better if I run my own control plane on some other provider but if I want managed k8's is this still the best option price wise? I guess if something like Hetzner or OVH is less than half the price it may even be worth the headache to run my own control plane (which has it's own advantages too - currently I'm stuck with Cilium on DOKS and it would be nice to use another network provider for some of my use cases).

100%

Is it important that they're losing the branding of the $5 droplet? It seems that's significantly more of an impressionable number than 4 or 6, in my understanding of the factors that made them popular. To me they've simply lost the #1 thing that people remember them by and don't stand out with that simple change. That's the only change that worries me.

its all of us trying to maximize TC that drives up the cost!