using route 53 has always been worth it for me, and it's not that hard to only use it for the bits you need rather than using it to manage an entire domain. e.

using route 53 has always been worth it for me, and it's not that hard to only use it for the bits you need rather than using it to manage an entire domain. e.g. my company hosts our own legacy BIND servers, so our main root domains live there, but I wanted to be able to use Route53 for easy DNS updates within Cloudformation. So, we just set up sub-zones in BIND that forward to a route 53 hosted zone (*.prod-aws.whatever.com), and our user facing domain names (foo.whatever.com) just cname to something in the sub-zones (Foo.prod-aws.whatever.com) that route53 manages. That's just one example that's not 100% applicable here, but the point is you can get creative and only use it for what you need, which I've found makes it much easier to accept.