This can definitely happen in some cases, but in plenty of other cases, moving off the cloud can give you an enormous cost savings _and_ dramatically improve yo

This can definitely happen in some cases, but in plenty of other cases, moving off the cloud can give you an enormous cost savings _and_ dramatically improve your performance at the same time. A coworker of mine was employee ~10 at a startup with some basic photogrammetry workloads. They ran jobs over ~0.1 to 1GB of images (lasting anywhere from minutes to hours) and operated primarily on Digital Ocean. They also had VPSes at AWS and Azure. My coworker helped them move this to LXC running on top of cheap last-gen dedicated servers. He built the entire (pretty simple) job management stack in about two weeks. As a result, the company was able to scale to ~100x the previous number of jobs at roughly the same cost. The improvement was so dramatic that they were able to offer a free tier for their services - a business-model change enabled by cheap physical hardware. In my own experience, I recently moved a production Postgres database off of Compose, who was charging us something like $400 a month for 2GB of RAM and 20GB of storage. I moved it to a hot-swap pair running in Rackspace on boxes that cost $2000 /month for the pair. That's 5x the cost. However, they each have 64GB of RAM and an 800GB SSD. The migration took me about two days total, including learning how to set up the hot-swap, and we have had very few operational issues with the database (knock on wood). This decreased our mean page load times by an order of magnitude. In some cases, dedicated hardware can really be worth the time cost.