Most apps are much more ops intensive per unit of compute than what you describe, which makes paying cloud compute costs to offload some large fraction of the ops workload to someone else more worthwhile than it seems to have been for your app.

And even in your case, I wonder if it would have gotten off the ground if you had to deal with infrastructure up front rather than as an efficiency move after the basic applocation was built, up, running, and stable: even if the cloud was mostly useful for ramping new systems up to the point where the system was basically stabilized and the infrastructure and ops needs were clear and could be assessed at leisure and efficiently provided with dedicated resources, that would still be a huge role.