I've made a couple of deals, apart from the hand-wavy "find the highest price they're willing to pay you're also happy with".
I usually calculate the starting price using CPM (cost per mille ie. cost per 1000 views) and adjust up/down depending on eg. how likely the number of eyeballs is likely to go up.
This works for both your website and your newsletter.
A decent CPM for a website could be $3-5 up to maybe $10 CPM (remember that whatever the CPM, more eyeballs -> higher price). Newsletter is probably from $7-10 up to double digits as a CPM.
Frontend: Vue, handlebars or static HTML (maybe built with a static site generator)
Backend: Express/Node (goto) or netlify lambda (trying this out)
Hosting: now.sh, netlify, cloudflare (CDN)
Database: Postgres, Airtable
Still looking for good (cheap) database hosting, I might have a look at spinning up a Dokku instance on DigitalOcean.
jesthandbook.com is coming along nicely, will be ready for release some time in January.
Would that work with your audience?
I'm sure it would!