Yes AWS is crazy expensive, their business model is simple yet super effective and they are swimming in money, power to them, make custom services with custom APIs, make it very cheap/free for low volume use and then crazy expensive when the usage goes up and the customer is vendor locked-in into their services + push enough money into marketing to so it is everyone's first choice.

Not only AWS is very expensive but also rather hard to use and all their forms and services pretty difficult to navigate as well, it put me off the cloud hype for very long time until I actually discovered reasonably-priced* cloud providers like DigitalOcean (or linode, vultr,...) with also very easy to use platforms.

* of course still pricier than dedicated hardware/VPS, however the premium for hourly billing and infrastructure maintenance is reasonable