I really really want to use OTel for a small project but have always had a really tough time finding a path that is cheap or free for a personal project.
In theory you can send telemetry data with OTel to Cloud Watch, but I've struggle to connect the dots with the front end application (e.g. React/Next.js).
Have you checked out Jaeger [1]? It is lightweight enough for a personal project, open source, and featureful enough to really help "turn on the lightbulb" with other engineers to show them the difference between logging/monitoring and tracing.
grafana cloud, honeycomb, etc have free tiers, though you'll have to watch how much data you send them.
or you can self host something like signoz or the elastic stack.
frontend will typically go to an instance of opentelemetry collector to filter/convert to the protocol for the storage backend.
In theory you can send telemetry data with OTel to Cloud Watch, but I've struggle to connect the dots with the front end application (e.g. React/Next.js).