You can probably get that for free at Amazon AWS for 750 hours a month, with a new account. That runs for 12 months.
Since you are on a thin budget, I recommend buying AWS credits on this forum to get you started. They are typically 50% off.
Amazon has a ton of hidden fees across all of their cloud computing services. Storing EC2 snapshots costs money, incoming data transfer costs money (and you're syncing a node so add 2 and 2 together) and also the IPv4 addresses themselves even have a cost. All these things are used when you create a new VPS there so you really have to be careful to stay within their free tier.
There are probably more AWS costs I've missed too. Maybe you should hit up @Vod, he's the resident AWS expert around here.
You're absolutely right! They're trying to lure new customers by offering free trials and stuff like that but the hidden fees are there, as you mentioned above. I'm also not sure about their terms and conditions if they allow crypto-related projects and what is their position on censorship. You have to investigate this unless you want to wake up to your website/vps suspended or even terminated with no way to recover your data.