im trying to cut down on my digital ocean bill and have a few small freelance websites, im paying 15$ a month for a mysql db and kinda feel ripped off

i know mongodb atlas offers mongo for free, does any service offer mysql for free and would you recommend using it for a clients website?

Oracle cloud free tier is pretty generous but I've only really dicked around with it, aws for work stuff.

6 small VMs (or one larger) and 20gb database, plus other stuff, free forever

Any chance you could switch to SQLite? It's surprisingly performamt

Like @ScriptCoded said, use sqlite. The thing is, if you don't need to scale horizontally it will preform really well.

The reason why it performs good is you skip network overhead with sqlite.

The suggestion from @retoor is also something you should consider, even if you chose sqlite.

Having docker images will make way easier to test and hop between cloud providers so you can get optimal pricing.