When I think of my core Terraform infrastructure that I can spin up for any project, the only resource with a recurring AWS/Google/Azure cost is NAT Gateways. You can get very cost-competitive with the instances themselves with reservations and/or spot, depending on your architecture. The costs of the big clouds and the small ones is basically the same here.

The way the cost balloons out of control for most companies is for things like S3 access (applications that HEAD the bucket every 60 seconds and hit the API request cash register), or managed services like EKS, Amazon ElasticSearch, etc. It's in the "oh I don't have to learn how to manage X application" where cloud gets expensive.

Smaller providers solve that problem by not even giving you that option. It's not that AWS is expensive, it's that they give you rope to hang yourself with.