Camunda Exporters in production

Hi,
we are going to use Camunda 8 on a new project for microservice orchestration but i’ve few questions.
Unfortunately in the project there is no budget for an enterprise license but we would like to use Camunda 8, so we’re opting for zeebe with an exporter.
We would like use simple monitor in place of operator but we haven’t understand yet if it’s ok for production. The load it’s not expected to be high, is this a valid approach? you can suggest a different strategy?
We also thinked to use Camunda 7 with remote worflow pattern, but we would prefer to stay on camunda 8 and switch to the enterprise version in the future.

Thanks in advance for hints,
Giorgio.