Two things I can see, needs to be on scalable infrastructure rather than a few hosts running docker-compose. Needs to have support for in-memory key/value stores for caching. Either of these would probably help out a bit. Donate to the developers or instance maintainer and either could happen.
The cost quickly adds up for small underfunded projects though. You also need to factor in how the application does scale. What kind of ingress/load balancing is required. What kind of stateful storage is required. Network policy. Resource monitoring. Config management, CI/CD pipeline. I setup a basic cluster on gke to start but haven’t gotten around to building these just yet. I’ve got a goal of attempting the most performant, scalable, and cheapest instance out there.