If we are only considering traffic then sure AWS can be expensive. Costs me $730 for 17TB of data at the moment. But looking at where money is being saved. 6 ec2 instances previously was $648.24/m, now its $6.82/m after moving to Step Functions / Lambda's, and it just works better as there's no fighting for resources anymore.

You know whats expensive in AWS. S3 Storage. Got some odd ~500TB stored in there. But at 6k/m I can't imagine trying to keep that in dedicated hardware. Atleast in S3 I feel it's safe.

A lot of hobby and or small websites and business could benefit from a pay-per-ms model like AWS Lambda.

It's literally pennies in some cases, vs. renting a server that sits idle 99% of the time.

What "hobby and or small websites and business" deal with medium to high amount of traffic? Those seems to strictly fall into the "low amount of traffic" bucket.

Besides, you could either rent a $5/month VPS that you know will always be $5/month, or you can use AWS Lambda and never know what your bill is gonna be at the end. Your new blogpost hit frontpage of HN? Good news, your bill is now $40 for this month.

Most (85% maybe) of my clients I work with want consistent costs over cheaper costs.

A can rent a few €/month VM that is idling all the time but who cares, or struggle developing with AWS Lambda and risk paying orders of magnitude more.