That's true - if you want to make a fair comparison between the two you need to consider the costs of the setup on AWS vs the cost of setting it up on whatever your platform of choice is. For a small team with no/development only loads, then a $5 digital ocean droplet would likely work for them, maybe even 10 of them. It's not worth managing a VPS for deploying 5 containers when you can have DO do it for $25 behind a load balancer. For a small team with moderate load, the question is "is it worth spending X on setup to save Y but potentially spend Z on maintenance of the systems on Hetzner/whoever, vs spending A on setup, B on compute and C on maintenance". If the difference is < 6 months salary, you go with whatever your current team is comfortable with and reevaluate in a year.
For a large company, it's not about $ cost, it's about risk management and avoiding cost centers.
