I spent over a year doing a full migration from AWS EC2 + ECS instances to GCP + docker + kubernetes. It was a huge task that has paid off very well.
1) Costs per customer are lower because you can fit more containers per VM due to kubernetes doing the scheduling for you. Customers also include developer environments.
2) The number of deploys is way up because there is a simple and established pattern that everyone follows.
3) The speed of creating new services has increased because of the established patterns with containers, kubernetes resources, and deploys. Thinks days vs weeks to get something running.
4) The number of Ops issues are lower because kubernetes handles so many things for you. For example, if a deploy is incorrect for some reason, the old service is sitting there running. No outage = no escalation = everyone sleeps at night.
Even if I was a tiny startup, I would still recommend using Kubernetes. The patterns, tooling and insight that Kubernetes gives you will save you TIME. The time saved is worth more than the tiny cost of a 3 node Kubernetes cluster. That is time you can use to develop your product and sell it vs time spent ftp'ing binaries to your Digital Ocean instance. :)
I know you're only picking on Digital Ocean incidentally here, but their managed Kubernetes offering is Pretty Okay. I use it for my personal stuff and it's pretty much everything I expect from a managed Kubernetes offering.
Just don't use EKS. That is managed Kubernetes in the checkbox marketing sense only.
