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I've been able to host a Laravel app on the free tier of AWS for a year now and hasn't cost a dime (beyond other AWS fees like Route53 domain management).

Where I push the limits quickly is:

• S3 storage - It's easy to reach the GET limits here if you have lots of images to load (like a directory website, e-commerce shop, etc).
• DB storage - If you have any sort of complex database, you'll probably have to pay for extra DB storage space. It caps out at like 10k entries or something, and it's easy to reach that with any sort of relational database.
• Elastic Beanstalk - I made the mistake of following a tutorial for an EB instance and found a few $50/month charges on my account for an old project I didn't even finish deploying. Luckily AWS staff was kind enough to remove it. Just keep in mind not all services are free (or cheap).

I'd recommend hosting your app on there for a month or so, get some average usage statistics, and apply those values to their pricing calculator

In terms of DigitalOcean, they only charge by the storage space and bandwidth use. So it's easier to run an Laravel app on there without incurring "micro-charges". If your app reaches some sort of performance limitation, the DO server will just crash (or you can automatically scale it up, depending on your setup). However, you don't get the benefit of dedicated services like AWS' RDS, so you'd have to spin up your own SQL server (either in the same droplet, or preferably another).