A better starting point would be a vps like DigitalOcean or Linode or Vultr. These days I’m not recommending anyone to use “cloud” (aws/azure/gcp) unless they have a specific need.
Let's also be realistic here: CloudFront is a good solution if you need a file to be served over CDN with low latency in multiple regions. Raw s3 or just a web server is much cheaper if you don't need low latency over multiple regions.
US offerings being way more overpriced than EU alternatives also boils down to the much larger capital/war-chest US tech companies have at their disposal to spend on Ops to conquer a market, a fact reflect in those prices but also in things like dev salaries, office equipment, etc.
EU offerings are better priced because most EU companies, who aren't bankrolled by some mega VC fund, cannot afford to pay US levels of pricing.
Using Cloud services that are obviously more expensive than self-hosted options reduces both numbers- less time to launch stuff, but less money. The point is that in early-stage startups, the costs are so low that paying an order of magnitude more for Operations may not move the second number by very much at all, since most of the money is paying for developers.