So $5 is way cheaper? if you need any of those data down the line, transferring out, any savings you have with AWS in the past year or years are going to be wiped out.

I think it would be good if people didn't always pick these services based on price, since that's how you end up with one monopoly service and no alternatives.

Support alternatives even if they are a bit more expensive.

Agreed. The price difference in a lower usage case is not meaningful. I would choose based on ease of use, reliability and functionality.

The main thing stopping me from using Digital Ocean is AWS RDS which is amazing. If they could bring out a similar solution with backups and MySQL and PostgreSQL, that would be amazing. :) I could then run my apps in docker.

Well, I actually agree with you. In my first post above my reply, I did say that I actually use both services based on my use cases. Both excellent, and work well (Oh, and I also use the Minio open source solution for one particular project too). Horses for courses.