IMHO the optionality the cloud gives you is the main value at the low-end. You can play around with different architectures, mixing and matching managed services with no commitment. When you need to scale you can always switch to on-prem, and with the benefit of having a working system to base your hardware requirements on. Of course this migration has costs too, but if this is your strategy you can minimize cloud-specific dependencies and leverage automation that can be used in both environments (eg. ansible).