thank you. came to the comments to say exactly this.
cloud could be cheap, but it's a lot of work, or at least attention. people get disappointed with the costs, paradoxically, because cloud is easy and, as you put, versatile. and often between any two options allowing to do the same thing, the easier one will be more expensive.
the biggest irony of the cloud is that many companies it seems, just like different species evolved into crabs, discover that all they need is a couple of own servers in a managed hosting environment, a CDN and outlook.
Don't tell anyone, but I suspect it's a pc with a GPU. Maybe even a hard drive. Wild!