Serverless is cheap as hell as low volumes. Your tiny VPS can't scale to zero. If you're doing sustained traffic your tiny VPS might win though. The real value in Cloud is turning capex spend into opex spend. You don't have to wait weeks or months to requisition equipment.
Nobody cares about your college book report. It's there to prove, or teach you, that you can do the extremely basic task of synthesizing information. Same with math without a calculator. You should have a mental model of basic math. It helps avoid shooting your foot off later. You might never have to do math from first principles again, but you should get over the hump once.