Normal VPSes and other relevant offerings are pretty cheap these days if you don't consider one of the big three clouds. They will cover most use cases and load

Normal VPSes and other relevant offerings are pretty cheap these days if you don't consider one of the big three clouds. They will cover most use cases and loads just fine for a long time also and there are practically no autoscaling issues, budget overruns etc. You could of course show some concrete examples from you experience. In my experience, you save the most time and money when you work with a solution that is less dynamic and more general purpose, like a VPS instead of specific scalable services without fixed price. Also, it is quite easy to switch providers with a VPS. With specific scalable services less so.