Hi and thanks for the kind words.

You use a load balancer when you need to use it. Having a load balancer for dev/staging/prod environment seems strange out of context (but I’m curious to know more on it!).

IMO, when you have different environment, it’s important to keep a strong separation among them. In addition, for better and consistent tests, having the exact same environment/context for dev, staging and prod environment prevent any surprises the D-Day.

If it’s a personal project, sure, it’s expensive and you can cheat by using only one. If you are a company, are you sure that $50 per month for 3 environment is a problem? Especially if it’s to prevent issues in production and to speed up the bug fixing by having the exact same runtime environment in staging and in production?

Sometime it worth to spend more for a while to have a safer future!