GCE has its own issues. The raw price is different than the real/total cost. In a better world you shouldn't have to choose between just a few cloud peoviders.
How have you observed the total cost being different from the raw price? In what ways were you surprised?
If you are after the raw price you should sign up for bare metal and install/manage your own tools. When you sign up for a service such AWS you pay mostly for the tools/ecosystem and management. I think AWS is still the undisputed leader in that regard, closely followed by Azure. GCP is something I would not recommend due some personal experiences namely the appengine platform and early cloud sdk releases.