I pay far less for AWS than I ever did for the providers in this article. Clearly YMMV depending on your workload and also how well you optimise for a cloud providers strengths. Hence making broad statements is unhelpful. There's a place for AWS/GC/Azure, and also for the likes of Vultr/Do and also for rolling your own. It all depends on what you need to achieve. There's no one size fits all.