Note that that tiny VM/compute instance only comes with 1G of transfer, which you might use just doing a speedtest.. if anything close to normal transfer for a public facing site traverses that VM, you will see charges for sure.
Yeah, bandwidth is exceedingly expensive on all the cloud providers. If you're going to use general cloud infrastructure, that's impossible to avoid. (Again excluding simpler providers like Digital Ocean where you get a terabyte or two of bandwidth included).
I've taken to throwing CloudFlare in front of any of my personal services that serve static content and which are in danger of using a lot of bandwidth. Bandwidth served through CloudFlare is free, so as long as you're hitting their cache you won't see any charges at your cloud.
Good point, however, may as well just use Netlify if we're just talking about static assets. Anyway, the 600M always free VM instance is a pretty awesome freebie for sure. There's plenty you can do with it, even if you have to end up paying some cents for BW.
