I would've agreed with you a couple years ago, but now things have changed. Clouds like AWS and GCE are increasingly offering services that one can't replicate

I would've agreed with you a couple years ago, but now things have changed. Clouds like AWS and GCE are increasingly offering services that one can't replicate on their own dedicated box. ML, Managed Databases, etc. can't really be replaced. Another thing is the skills one needs to efficiently manage and deploy everything. The sysadmin, devops positions in a startup have vanished because now that's AWS and GCE. Sure, AWS/GCE are expensive, but the developers don't need to worry about uptime, and if something happens to their instances, they just hit 'delete instance' and start up a new one. The new theme seems to be developer productivity rather than cost effectiveness. With the new automatic deploy tools, and automatic load balancing, there's not really a need for anyone to worry about managing systems. It might seem like premature optimization, but you're saving the paycheck that needs to be paid to the sysadmin who has to be there for 24/7 monitoring. This is all assuming one of the existing developers on the team isn't also a rockstar sysadmin, security guru and an insomniac who doesn't have a family.