I paid 150€ for a Mini PC with an Intel N100, 16 GB of DDR5 memory, and a 500 GB SSD.

While I have no intention to scale up low spec hardware like this, it at least seems to beat the Azure VMs we use at work with "4 CPUs", which corresponds to two physical cores on an AMD EPYC CPU.

And that super slow machine I understand costs more than $100 per month, and that's without charges for disk space slower than the SSD, or network traffic.

Renting at Azure seems to be a terrible decision, particularly for desktop use.