Cloud gets expensive when you use it like bare metal (always-on VMs, managed databases, data egress). But serverless can scale cheaper than bare metal for the right workloads. I run a content site processing 2,500 documents a day on $5/month Cloudflare Workers + R2, serving millions of page views. That said, doing cloud "right" requires rethinking architecture specifically for the cloud setup and requires to basically use vendor lock-in as a feature.