You've overthinking things. Give the Free Tier a shot and you'll see how easy it is to get an instance up and running. Sure, there is a lot of customization available if you want it though you can make do with the defaults most of the time.
I don't want a chat app to be an operating system. I prefer to have things separated, since that makes them easier to manage(for me). I spent some time performing a penetration test against a service that would hook into WeChat, and found the security atrocious. I wouldn't touch anything related to WeChat so long as I can help it. Haha, this is sort of like the modern-day Emacs.