Good point, it becomes clear that if you are operating at the scale of a large company the large scale and rich ecosystem are important. It was just a bit surprising to me that for smaller scale instances AWS is so much more expensive. It would seem they should be cheaper due to economies of scale.
AWS is definitely aware that their costs can be prohibitive for brand new startups. Check out AWS Activate[1]. If you can demonstrate that you're a legit startup, there's a decent chance you can get free AWS credits, not to mention free support.
Getting the business level support is absolutely necessary if you don't have someone with AWS experience and are doing anything substantially complicated. The free-ish support is, on the whole, pretty abysmal. The availability of solution architect time is not always useful. You ask 3 people and get 3 different answers. I've given some thought to doing consulting around this for equity but haven't figured what that would have to look like. There's a lot of wrong turns one can go down pretty easily. Bottomline, Activate is helpful but not sufficient.
Consider that whenever you are paying for AWS you are also paying for whatever proportional part of the AWS infrastructure is sitting idle at any one time - Amazon still need to cover those costs - it just get amortised over the paid resource usage.
