I don't understand why AWS' free-tier requires putting things into a VPC. It is a complete turn-off. It took me days to figure how to configure it correctly to

I don't understand why AWS' free-tier requires putting things into a VPC. It is a complete turn-off. It took me days to figure how to configure it correctly to access it through SSH without following a guide that builds out some giant infrastructure. It should just be one-click to throw everything up that I need and hide all of that extra config behind a wall that I can access if I want / need to.