What's the best free (or cheap) Elasticsearch cloud solution ?

Hi,

I'm looking for a solution to host an Elasticsearch instance. The offer on the official Elastic cloud starting at 16$/month seems to be a bit of a waste of money for my very modest side project, yet I still need to be able to host about 500 000 to 600 000 documents...

I thought of using Google Cloud with the free credits (which I probably won't use anyway) but I'm still a newbie in devops and I don't see myself configuring a VM on my own, or learning how to use Kubernetes just for that occasion.

Anyone knows a good alternative?
Thanks.