Does anyone pay list price for AWS? Either you're small enough to avail of startup credits etc. or you're big enough to negotiate a personalised discount
If you know what you're doing, and knows a better part of the AWS services, the discount you'll get just by knowing what you're doing is probably bigger at that point.
Cloud native can go to either extreme cost wise, and it's very dependent on good engineering (which, unfortunately, is the exception not the norm).
