I’m curious, how much did you have to pay for your licenses? If you are a single founder with a new startup, it seems like you’d need a bunch of money to be able to use Microsoft in production, unless you can use something like BizSpark (if that’s still a thing?).
If using Microsoft be very wary of the cost of understanding the licencing - especially for the "free" options.
Many years ago we used BizSpark, and we wasted far too many days and dollars trying to understand and use the licencing (and using the abysmal web interface that was mandatory). We couldn't end up jumping through the right hoops to use products in production, even though were target audience for the products when we started our business. The licences had very broad exceptions that gave Microsoft the right to pull the plug at any time.
I'm sure things are different now, but I'm also sure they are the same.
BizSpark is not still a thing. The replacement program, Microsoft for Startups, requires being associated with a partnered "startup-enabling organization."
A standard sized Azure App Service runs about a $75 a month. That will let you host about as many ASP.NET sites on it as you want - and there's no VM that you have to manage. Scaling up or out is pretty painless if you need to
A SQL database on Azure runs about $5-$15 a month, depending on how you configure it.
Once you throw in SSL certs and DNS management, you're probably looking at about $100 a month.
You'll want to switch to the Single Database and change the pricing model from vCore to DTU. Then you can pick Basic or Standard and adjust the size and compute resources.
Basic will do quite a lot; I use one to load test our application and haven't hit limits.
I use Leaseweb and they include a line item for the license price. It is all very affordable. I pay about $65 a month for a Windows 2016 server that I run IIS and SQL Server on for all of my projects I have going on. Very fast, affordable, etc. My SQL Server came from MS Bizspark for free (MSDN).
Last I knew, Visual Studio Professional was about $500 for a single user. SQL Server can get expensive depending on what you're hosting, but IIS and ASP.NET don't cost anything. All you'd need is a Windows box for those.
SQL Server on RDS includes the SQL Server license and is very cost effective for what you get. (Backups, point in time restore, etc). They also offer EC2 with SQL Server but I’d rather pay the slight premium for the additional management.
