> For most small setups, the cost of running an empty kubernetes cluster (managed) is typically higher than setting up a db, a couple of vms and a loadbalancer, which goes a long way for running a simple service.

Not really, the cost of an empty EKS cluster is the management fee of $0.1/hour, or roughly the price of a small EC2 instance.

0.1 * 24 * 30 = 720$/month

That's about 2x our monthly cloud expenses. That's not a small VM. You can buy a mac mini for that.