I run a number of personal projects on AWS entirely on their serverless offerings and pay $0 outside of domain registration as I'm well within their free tiers. That seems pretty cost effective.
Yes, if you can abuse the free tiers, you can essentially run a small SaaS company for free. Once you scale past that point, you are on the hook for a (probably much too large) bill, when you could still be using the same $5 VPS.
