The important part here is that they all have somewhat competitive pricing and by just operating on VMs you don't end up with vendor lock-in. Your infra automation should be able to be pointed at some new IP address and it'll ssh into the VM and provision it for whatever service you need regardless.
A site that has some decent comparisons you can check out is www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare
Pick 2 providers to compare their VPS product prices, specs, features and benchmarks.
There are a lot of non-major-cloud providers that have VMs available, some common ones are Hetzner, Linode/Akamai Cloud, Vultr, OVH, Digital Ocean, etc.
This works great if you're building a fun toy or learning stuff but it doesn't mesh at all with the virality of the internet. It encourages you to ship things, effectively to production, without having figured out scaling at all and without having a firm understanding of the costs of your code.
In all honesty, their entire business proposition is get people who learned how to write Javascript but who might not know how computers work or like, what a docker container is or don't have the expertise or time to build their own infra and give them a way to deploy stuff quickly.
it's serverless, duh no server that means it's cheaper or something... /s
The higher up the stack the product is, the more the infra provider can charge you based on the value you get from the product, rather than the cost to provide the service. Commoditized products like VMs and CDN bandwidth has so many uses and so many providers you can't price discriminate as much.
I'm sure Vercel wanted to offer her some very special volume pricing and only charge $0.10/GB or something but I doubt they'd be anywhere near commoditized CDN pricing.
This is generally why I don't love things like Cloud/Lambda Functions and even a lot of managed K8s and DB products (though managed DB products provide a LOT of value, they're very expensive). Taking the time to run a docker container in a VM may slow down your initial rollout but will save you $$$
My general advice on scaling on the cheap is never buy a product that's too high level. If it abstracts away _all_ of the complexity for you, they're gonna nickel and dime you an insane amount wherever possible to extract maximum value. Buy commoditized things like VM compute and CDN BW directly.