> but after one year you are hit with a huge bill That's the thing, it's really not much of a bill if you do it right. Aside from possibly the S3 bandwidth bil

> but after one year you are hit with a huge bill That's the thing, it's really not much of a bill if you do it right. Aside from possibly the S3 bandwidth bill, which could easily be avoided by using something like Netlify, nothing in that setup I described will get prohibitively expensive until you reach significant scale. Yes, EC2 is expensive compared to other providers. So don't use EC2. You can build a startup on Amazon's managed services for a lot less and you can build in a way that's pretty easy to get off when the time comes. Just make sure to build in the proper adapters around your business logic. It's not hard to write code that works equally well under Lambda and Express and I assume you can do likewise for Java, C# and Python if you'd prefer to use those runtimes. There are certain classes of startup that don't make sense in the cloud...as others have mentioned, if you've got heavy storage or egress requirements, cloud quickly gets very expensive. But for the majority of startups, particularly B2B, that's not the case and there's ways to build in the cloud that are damn close to free, both in dollars and ops resources. There's a group of technically-minded people who I believe are addicted to managing their own boxes. They got comfortable with doing it back when it was required and now don't want to learn a new way of doing things. But that new way really is faster and cheaper for most small businesses. And if people take some time to experiment with Serverless, Apex or some of the other tools that have sprung up around Lambda/Cloud Functions/Azure Functions, I believe most will see the virtue in moving on from self-managed servers for most workloads.