Yeah, that's just a bit too much $ for what I need. I've been looking at Linode, Scaleway, Vultr, Digital Ocean but they are a bit too pricey. This isn't a mission critical DB and doesn't have to be SSD speeds.
Realistically the cheapest option is probably renting a physical machine thats a bit older as others have suggested. If its not a true database that needs block storage, and just flat files, S3 is always hard to beat.
I ran this for about a year. Queries took a good 5 minutes but was a very cheap way to archive data.
No durability though if the disk bites it you lose.