You and another person made this point _but_ I’d encourage you to look at what $50/mo gets you on AWS all in. In reality it will get you a t4g.small plus 200GB of (very slow) storage. Honestly they start to chug at 500 or so users in my experience.
PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch clusters can be operated at a fraction of the cost of comparable managed services offered by the major cloud providers.
The idea that this necessarily involves excessive maintenance effort is nonsense.
The skills needed to use hyperscalers properly are better invested in fundamental sysadmin know-how.
(of course, say goodbye to resume points and your cloud provider conference invite. Question is, what are you trying to do? Are you building a business, or a resume?)
It isn’t an apples to apples comparison. But, you trade some additional operational overhead for a whole lot more hardware.