Quoting the price of a VPS totally misses the point - the cost is in finding one, setting it up with an environment somehow, monitoring it, making sure it stays patched and current over years and years...If you are spending that much time managing infrastructure on AWS, you’re doing it wrong. ElasticBeanstalk makes it dead simple.
While you're busy figuring out what monitoring solution to use on your VPS to monitor the running all for the sake of a little Python script, I've already set up a lambda function and maybe set a cloudwatch alarm to look after it and can move on to the next thing and leave it running indefinitely. Depending on the usecase I might not even pay a penny during that time, either.
And you can do the same with AWS and a bunch of micro instances. But if it’s that low volume, I would just host it myself.
I swear 90% of the hate for serverless purely stems from irritation at the name.
I love serverless for everything but APIs. But 90% of my hate for serverless is with APIs and the cold starts.