n00bsaibot
Well-known member
Linode does per hour-pricing, and is still better pricing wise than AWS. You just need to roll your own scaling implementation to use Linode's API. But this requires developer hours which can get expensive if you don't have the skills in-house.
At least for compute. Bulk data storage is another matter where it can be very challenging to beat AWS S3
I'm saying this without checking... but from memory the AWS prepaid options were deeply discounted. It was super cheap for expensive stuff, if that makes sense.
But like I said. You need to have a super popular site that consistently needs a lot of resources to make it worth it.