With AWS you also pay for much more than just hardware.
Even when compared with other cloud providers, AWS is super expensive.
The only interesting service that AWS provides is the ability to host your services globally through multiple availability zones, but unless you need to provide a global service with low latency everywhere in the globe then that's just not worth the time and money.
> Even when compared with other cloud providers, AWS is super expensive.
Well this is not true. I don't think Azure is much cheaper in that regard. In reality, the big clouds are watching each other very closely. Do you have data other than anecdote evidence?
Also if you are big enough, you can negotiate better deal with AWS separately, and I believe that is the norm.
Why, yes. Take Hetzner for example. With their Hetzner cloud offering you get, say, 1vCPU with 2GB of RAM and 2TB of traffic for 3€/month. For an instance with 2vCPUs yo pay about 4.15€.
For an equivalent EC2 instance (t3.small) you pay about 5x the price, and you still need to pay additional costs such as egress charges.
Heck, with Hetzner you can spend less than 50€/month and get a dedicated box with 64GB of RAM and 4 real cores with free unlimited traffic over a dedicated 1Gb connection.
It isn't even up for debate: AWS price-gouges their customers. Unless you have a very particular need to deploy an application globally, it's very hard to defend paying AWS's cost.
> The Hetzer-equivalent service is Amazon Lightsail,
No it isn't. Hetzner provides full blown linux instances with 2GB of RAM, while the Ligthsail instance type you're trying to compare has a barely workable 512MB of RAM. That's the equivalent of a meager Orange Pi Zero.
The Lightsail instance type that is equivalent to Hetzner's 4€/month instance is sold for 20€/month.
Even when compared with other cloud providers, AWS is super expensive.
The only interesting service that AWS provides is the ability to host your services globally through multiple availability zones, but unless you need to provide a global service with low latency everywhere in the globe then that's just not worth the time and money.