I’m a big AWS fan. I’d recommend any company of decent size to use AWS. But seriously, if your project is just a personal blog or some rails app you tinker with on the weekend, just get a $5/mo instance on Digital Ocean or a raspberry pi.
It is similar with resume-driven architectures: let’s build an architecture of the place I want to work, instead of the one for where I do work.
[0] I won't go into detail here, but it mostly boils down to me working in a specialisation where what skills employers think they need is usually very different to what they actually utilise. If I get laid off tomorrow, I still need to pass an interview somewhere else.
I kinda want to move it to a self-hosted solution, but it's been working fine so far so why bother. Might need to log in and see if I need to update something someday.
There are some mitigating things you can do, set limits on various resources and billing / budgeting alerts but fundamentally I don't think there's an easy way to avoid being on the hook for unexpected costs.
Theoretically you could have lambdas that react to billing alerts and shut things down but I've never seen anyone set that up.
Check out https://aws.amazon.com/free/
You’ll still need a Credit Card on file for overages.