> Could not even run npm ci with the resources available. I kept having to resize the VM. First up to the $6 then I was running into different stuff. I ended up going up to the $24 / mo option just to get the image building.

This makes very little sense to me. I’ve been using $4 droplets to host a variety of projects (much of the time on the same server) and have rarely hit such issues.

How inefficient is the code for it to need the $24 droplet?

You probably shouldn’t be building the image on the droplet though, maybe build locally, release to docker registry, and only pull the image from the server.