This hits on something in the calculation that I feel is very hard to factor in, the cost of development time. Sure, there are plenty of ways to do these things

This hits on something in the calculation that I feel is very hard to factor in, the cost of development time. Sure, there are plenty of ways to do these things cheaper on a hardware/software cost per user basis, but more often than not I've found that we can get changes out so much faster in AWS that you're easily saving thousands in developer time, which would seem to more than cover the extra cost to me.