I thought one of the main selling points was the on-demand computing power and per second billing. So instead of having a $5/mo VPS you only pay 30c or whatever your usage was for that month.

I do know that billing can get confusing and in some unfortunate cases people ended up paying 10x or 100x more than they expected.

Maybe my example was bad, but my point was that sometimes it's ok to not go on the most-efficient route and that for an MVP "good enough" is actually the best way to go.

The main reason people choose AWS is orchestration ability and scaling, the cost is usually hidden in "free" tiers until you start to scale and it becomes visible.

Bandwidth being one of the largest issues...

The second is cost complexity..

AWS pricing is also so complex that Amazon provides cost calculators to get an estimate, however, since most services intertwine, it's so easy to miss obvious cost points that business provide cost-savings service for AWS specifically.

The costs have become so complex, that AWS customers even use AWS own ML service to log and do cost analysis.

https://www.concurrencylabs.com/blog/aws-quicksight-cost-opt...

I totally agree with your premise, I just wanted to point out that AWS is rarely as cost effective as a VPS.

If you're spending 30c in lambda, you're probably cheaper than a 5$/mo VPS but I'd argue you'd be covered by heroku (or similar) free tier.

In theory, AWS gives you more tool so you don't have to build / manage software yourself.

In practice, the markup on the tools is significant and you usually pay a premium for devops who know AWS over those who don't.

If you're saving a lot of development time by using AWS tools, it could be worth it, but I haven't seen many companies where that is true.

Maybe it makes more sense in Silicon Valley where tech people are much more expensive.