Definitely agree—Discord bots got me into JavaScript! (For better or worse, lol.)
To anyone who wants to build and host a hobby bot, I've had a good experience with using fly.io to host mine. They don't charge you for any monthly billing periods whose total cost would be less than five dollars (USD), so for small projects that would never get close to meeting that threshold, it's free ninety nine. Hard to beat that!
I didn't realize they had a (effectively) scale-to-zero option! Is it possible to store a bit of state, or is the bot entirely for ephemeral responses? I wasn't clear on what storage would be available from their pricing page.
Both bots I run are just for ephemeral responses, so unfortunately I'm not sure. I tend to be well under the $5 threshold, though, even at 2x bots, so it seems like there's plenty of wiggle room for more storage without incurring totally nutso costs.
(And even if you do exceed the $5 threshold, it's still waaaaaay cheaper than other options I've seen. RIP to Heroku's free hobby tier.)
To anyone who wants to build and host a hobby bot, I've had a good experience with using fly.io to host mine. They don't charge you for any monthly billing periods whose total cost would be less than five dollars (USD), so for small projects that would never get close to meeting that threshold, it's free ninety nine. Hard to beat that!