Sure, for tiny intel servers it makes sense to rent vms. It won't start to hurt until 1.5 years later at which point the project needs to become profitable anyways.

I run a couple of on-premise xeon gold machines with 96 gb ram and 40+ cores on each. Their total purchase cost was the monthly cost of renting them on the cloud. Also, you will never get the full benefit of the servers you use unless they are dedicated instances with no virtualization layer.