Yeah... Looks like can get about $1/hr for 10 small VMs, ($0.10 per VM).

So for $3000, that's 3000 hours, or 125 days, (if just wastefully leave them on all the time, instead of turning them on when needed).

Say you wanted to play around for a couple of hours, that's like.. $3.

(That's assuming there's no bonus for joining / free tier, too.)

The VMs quickly get expensive if you leave them running though.

The desktop equivalent of your 10 T3 Micro instances is about $600 if you buy new. For example a Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Gen 2 Tiny 11JN009QGE has 8x3.2GHz processor with hyperthreading. That's 16 virtual cores compared to the 20 vcpus of the T3 instances, but with much faster cores. And 16GB RAM allows you to match the 1GB per instance.

If you don't have anything and feel generous throw in another $200 for a good monitor and keyboard plus mouse. But you can get a used crap monitor for $20. I'd give you one for free just to be rid of it.

That's a total of $800, or 33 days of forgetting to shut down the 10 VMs. Maybe half that if you buy used.

Granted not everyone has $800 or even $400 to drop on hobby projects, renting VMs often does make sense

You can rent a beefy vm with an H100 for $1.50 / hr

I regularly rent this for a few hours at a time for learning and prototyping

Are you comparing 10 VM with 1 shared core with a 144 core solution?