I should have phrased it better. If you rent cloud compute from a big provider you will probably end up paying more than if you ran that same compute, but then the actual cost of that same compute in the cloud is going to be lower when you add in economies of scale. They will get a cheaper deal on hardware, electricity and on almost anything you would need.
On the lower end, you can't beat a cheap hetzner vps for price, reliability and compute if you ran it 24/7.
On the lower end, you can't beat a cheap hetzner vps for price, reliability and compute if you ran it 24/7.