I completely agree with your line of reasoning and I have a few more thoughts on the matter. There are a ton of "soft" problems that arise when building out yo

I completely agree with your line of reasoning and I have a few more thoughts on the matter. There are a ton of "soft" problems that arise when building out your stack. Licensing, warranties, and maintenance issues are things that never come up with a cloud provider. Then there are physical problems with building your own cabinet like cabling and power & heat management. The list just grows and grows. Another big thing that rarely gets mentioned is research into exactly what hardware to purchase and how to configure it. Do you know what compute hardware you should purchase? There are 10s of vendors and thousands of options. What about network hardware? Do you know which switch is the best for your stack? With a cloud vendor all of these questions disappear. Even if you make a mistake in your cloud provisioning, it's easy to correct; just shut it down and start over. Make a mistake buying your own hardware and you have to live with it for 3 years or pay purchase more hardware. I think people tend to forget or ignore all of these costs when evaluating cloud providers. You look at the total bill each month and are surprised that it cost that much. However, the costs for your custom built architecture are likely higher, but they are spread out over more time and more projects.