Comment by kelnos
With a quick LLM-assisted search, looks like the cheapest EC2 instance is t4g.micro, which comes in at $2.04/mo. It has 2 vCPUs and and only 512MiB of RAM. (I assume that doesn't include disk; EBS will be extra.)
I can certainly see a use for that small amount of compute & RAM, but it's not clear that your level of needs is common. I've been paying for a $16/mo VPS (not on AWS) for about 15 years. It started out at $9/mo, but I've upgraded it since then as my needs have grown. It's not super beefy with 2 vCPUs, 5GiB of RAM, and 60GiB of disk space (with free data ingress/egress), but it does the job, even if I could probably find it cheaper elsewhere.
But not at Amazon. Closest match is probably a t3.medium, with 2 vCPUs and 4GiB RAM. Add a 60GiB gp2 EBS volume, and it costs around $35/mo, and that's not including data transfer.
The point that you're missing is we're not looking for the cheapest thing ever, we're looking for the cheapest thing that meets requirements. For many (most?) applications, you're going to overpay (sometimes by orders of magnitude) for AWS.
You say "if you need a lot", but "lot" is doing a bit of work there. My needs are super modest, certainly not "a lot", and AWS is by far not the cheapest option.
I run heaps of services on AWS and my bill is ~$2-3 - I'm not running any EC2 instances at all. Some of the offerings these cloud providers offer are extremely affordable if you know how to play your cards right and use the right services.