all I'd be able to run it from safely is a pi with a pruned chain (and without a constant connection)...
Somehow I was under the impression you need a full chain for this. What's the memory requirement? If it's not too much, a cheap VPS could do. Although I wouldn't trust those with much funds.
I've always wanted to run "something" that can fund any (small) LN payment request posted on the forum
within seconds. I already check all posts, but need the LN side of it to work.
I know I have mentioned it before but both raspiblitz
https://github.com/rootzoll/raspiblitz and mynode
https://www.mynodebtc.com are good "nodes in a box"
raspiblitz is for an RPi (get a 4 and an SSD) mynode will run on an RPi4 or Rock64 or a VM with virtual box.
Good support on both, on github and telegram.
-Dave