Learning/Administering AWS/GCP/Azure costs time and therefore money too. Maybe less money, maybe more money than doing things yourself, depending on what you're doing. But you shouldn't disregard such costs.

I've seen enough buddies spending enormous amounts of time doing AWS devops on top of paying the AWS premium when they could have gotten away easily with a less than a handful of VPS (+ optionally $100/month worth of cloudflare as a CDN).