I have a pretty complicated architecture that would cost me about 20-35$ if it was hosted just on Digitalocean or Hetzner. Instead its AWS ...soon to be multicloud, and costs me about 140$/mo (which does vary). But it does allow me to experiment, write long articles and design some fun stuff; about which I blog on my own website. The blog has gotten me both clients on freelance projects and enough "cred" to start on new projects I don't have any resume experience on. That's the only reason that I personally use cloud services (of course, the reasons for SaaS/Enterprise clients are usually more valid than mine).
I'm blogging about the experiments I am running with AWS hosted infrastructure. It could be hosted pretty much anywhere, a rpi would be enough. But I can't run those experiments on Hetzner, they simply don't offer as much options as AWS to run experiments.
