I'm very much paying my own cloud bills but there is no chance I would be able to orchestrate some of the workflows I want to orchestrate if it were not for Step Functions.

For a one person shop like me, AWS is a force multiplier. With it, I can do (say) 30% of what a dedicated engineer in a specific role could do. Without it, I'd be doing 0%.

I really like this tradeoff for my particular situation.