Curious to know more about what specifically you find obtuse about pricing? I've used Azure a lot, and don't recall any ambiguous pricing.
By the end of my 30 days, I found the bare minimum performing low volume .NET + SQL on Azure was going to be $30+/month even for just a prototype/development site, and I can pay less elsewhere for higher performance (though perhaps less control). And when I say "performing", I just mean the VM not being too slow to actually use as a UI, and throwing low memory errors constantly. The free tiers for Windows Server are, in my opinion, unusable at all.
By .NET + SQL, I assume you mean you were using an App Service? They come with a lot of convenience, but I definitely agree that they are too expensive, especially when considering the level of compute you get. I raised this with someone from Microsoft before, and they said they were confident the value offered was worth it.
There is a free tier for App Service though. It's a shared compute model - I tried it a while back, and the performance was totally fine for light usage.
I wouldn't try to run Windows Server on a B1S, as they only have 1GB of RAM :) You might just about get away with it for Server Nano, but I've never actually used it. Best stick with Linux or BSD for these tiny VMs.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-...
You just have to bite the bullet and learn a few linux admin tasks like setting up nginx, supervisor, file permissions.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deploy...