I was all in on Azure for years, but once my BizSpark wore off and died I was shocked at how expensive it was to run the most trivial side project or seedling o

I was all in on Azure for years, but once my BizSpark wore off and died I was shocked at how expensive it was to run the most trivial side project or seedling of an idea or non-money making project. As a .NET full stack web dev for like 14 years, I finally decided to put all my new learnings into just doing static sites on React and trying to figure out some AWS stuff because I wasn't going to try and use .NET on AWS when I had it so fairly figured out on Azure. For a serial entrepreneur and maker, it just couldn't cut it anymore. Now I do NextJS on Vercel with minimal extra services out of what they provide and I get way faster stuff for free pretty much and I guess I'm no longer the only .NET guy struggling to hold the fort in a big tech community that also thinks .NET is too old or boring or non-sexy. I still do like Azure better than AWS. The stupid, weird UX is still nicer than AWS. The docs by MS are 1000x better than everything on AWS. I miss MSSQL and the SQL Server Management Studio, but I don't miss the cost for scaling it enough to actually use it for scraping or data processing. I tried to sell friends on Azure and even got a part time gig from MS themselves to try and help local startups use it, but no one cared or was interested. It just doesn't have that same "standard" or "sexyness" or "built into every new tech" feel to it, so I doubt it'll ever really change or pull ahead in comparison.