[berkay]

I can only give you a datapoint. This has not been the case in our case. We never paid more than what we expected.

If you think VPS providers is an alternative to AWS, you have an entirely different use case than ours. For an application with high availability requirements, messages queues, scalable data store, etc. admin work is not "monthly backups". Implementing and maintaining highly available load balancing, message queues, data stores, DNS, auto scaling, etc. all require a lot of work, and often skills that you may not have in the team. AWS makes these tasks easier. You still have to do admin work, but much less of it, and don't have to be expert at each one. That's worth a lot.