A common objection when we suggest building out a deploy pipeline for a small team: "we only ship once a week, it's not worth automating." We used to half-agree with that. We don't anymore.
Manual deploys work fine, right up until they don't. The failure mode isn't usually dramatic — it's a forgotten migration step, an environment variable that didn't get copied over, or a deploy that happened from the wrong branch because someone was in a hurry. Individually minor. Cumulatively, they're where most self-inflicted outages come from.
Automating a deploy pipeline for a small team doesn't need to be a big project. In most cases it's: a script that runs the same steps every time, a place for that script to run that isn't someone's laptop, and a way to see what happened after it runs. That's most of the value, and it's a few days of work, not a few months.
The bigger the team gets, the more that initial investment pays for itself — but it's worth doing well before that point.