It sounds like migrating to Kubernetes will fix some of your issues. I wouldn't recommend managing your own cluster starting off though. The hardest barrier that you're going to be overcoming every time is LoadBalancer type services and trying to understand storage classes. These are two things that I think most people just need to see working before they try to implement it themselves.
While GKE, EKS, and AKS are definitely expensive, there are other providers like Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, and Civo that provide managed Kubernetes at fixed rates.
Digital Ocean
Their platform is fine, but they some really weird limitations that can't be changed. 7 storage volumes per droplet (cloud server) is something I couldn't really live with. Also the load balancers have connection limitations.
Linode
I have yet to run into any arbitrary limits with Linode. Though I have a really old account that actually has some archaic stuff still attached to it. The only real problem I see with Linode is they've been hacked a few times and they still attach a non-private "private network" to all their servers. Why they do this is just beyond me. We know this is a problem, but I guess some companies never learn.
Vultr
I would hold off until next week on using VKE. It's still in beta, they're releasing a fix for quite a few issues that they had to date. One of them is with a primary Kubernetes certificate not being complete. From what I have probed so far, VKE looks very promising.
From the support ticket I have with them, this is what they provided in our last interaction as to what's being patched:
- Konnectivity support
- Aggregation Layer Support
- Installation NFS and CIFS libraries
- Addition of new storage class "WaitForFirstConsumer"
- Various other improvements
Civo
These guys do managed k3s hosting and it's quite impressive. I really do like it. My only problem it is just that I can't provision block volumes types. Both their CSI doesn't support it and the underlying storage controller for their cloud. This can be a very big deal breaker depending on what you need. Outside of that, I pretty much like everything else they have going on.