Given that he's complaining about the price I don't think the wasteful costs here are justified. I'll also note the article was just edited and the costs are now up to $171 / month.
This app could easily be run on the AWS free tier, although even in the paid tier he could probably be managing a lot more than this workload for under $40 / month. (That's for two servers - which as has been pointed-out is wholly unnecessary for an app of this size.) The price he's paying is presently listed at $95.
Maybe I read his conclusion differently, but he said "would be peanuts" about the cost and "The bigger issue is that on the revenue side there’s a big fat zero."
Seems to me he's acknowledging he's built a thing that requires generating revenue to support itself, but that he's neglected the revenue generation part of his project, rather than complaining too much about the price of running it?
I'm mostly agreeing with you (and tristanperry and TekMol), but I'm probably being more sympathetic and ascribing un-supported motivations for why he's happy enough building it this way and spending this much money to run it. (Probably because I've been there before myself, and sometimes that expensive hobby project has paid off, sometimes it hasn't. I've never spend so much I've seriously regretted any of my failures though...)
This app could easily be run on the AWS free tier, although even in the paid tier he could probably be managing a lot more than this workload for under $40 / month. (That's for two servers - which as has been pointed-out is wholly unnecessary for an app of this size.) The price he's paying is presently listed at $95.