For K8S, I think the best alternative is AWS+kops. EKS also has a high fee for the control plane, and has a ton of shortcomings aside from that. AKS, at least the last time I used it, was much worse in terms of functionality. But I can spin up a kops-based cluster really quickly. It is capable of creating truly production-grade clusters.
If I'm running a small cluster, I can use a small VM for the master node(s) and get my control plane costs down much lower than $73/month.