Agreed. For me PaaS seems nice in theory until I start adding up the costs. For something that would generate revenue I'd go PaaS instead of playing sysadmin. But for my hobbies it's not worth it. I want a tiny postgres db, a tiny redis instance, a tiny bit of object storage...basically a tiny bit of everything. Maybe I'm not a good customer, I can accept that. I'm just happy it's possible to pay $5 and get a VM with 512 MB ram and 25GB of SSD storage, that would have been unthinkable $15 years ago. I have to manage everything on my own but I can run a few apps on that one VM.
To steal an old saying, VMs are cheap if your time is worth nothing. My time on weekends is worth nothing. Shrug.