It seems crazy to me that the two options are AWS vs bare metal to save that much money. Why not a moderate solution?
I came to the conclusion that when you factor everything in—the time it takes to maintain such a massive infrastructure operating smoothly across the globe, investment in the further development of cloud services, employing security experts, paying developers competitive salaries, and of course aiming for a profit margin for the company—you end up with the prices that are evident among the major cloud providers. It simply isn't feasible to offer these services for much less (there are a few exceptions people rightly complain about, such as stupidly high egress costs). It has reached a point where Google, for example, has attempted to undercut prices to such a degree that their cloud operations have been running at a loss in the past[^1].
[^1]: https://www.ciodive.com/news/google-cloud-revenue-Q2-2022/62... (read last paragraph)
It's probably easier to optimize your stack TBH. I can't wait until I get a chance to use ARM on AWS.