Well, to be fair, most of us who are paying the "bandwidth ransom" do have to scale, quite significantly I might add, and so the value is the platform as a whole.
Furthermore, if you are doing something for fun like you are, the bandwidth ransom definitely comes into play for elastic cloud environments, but anyone doing anything significant on AWS/GCP has definitely already negotiated down their bandwidth spend with their AWS/GCP account management team.
At large scales, decisions need to get made. AWS and GCP will not negotiate with you unless you're big enough to make any if that worth their time.
Netflix is a great example. They run most of their services on AWS. But they also run their own CDN with real hardware in data centers because serving it from Amazon would be a deal breaker.
There are reasons to use AWS and GCP. But when I start a project, I don't start there. It's too expensive one way or another, and the "free" tier gets blown out extremely quickly.
A smaller provider will provide what you need, normally be cheaper, and has no lock in. If you later decide that you really want autoscaling or managed databases then you can move easily. And if you do switch, you'll at least know what your product even wants to be, and it's projected growth.
Furthermore, if you are doing something for fun like you are, the bandwidth ransom definitely comes into play for elastic cloud environments, but anyone doing anything significant on AWS/GCP has definitely already negotiated down their bandwidth spend with their AWS/GCP account management team.