That's perfectly true, but AWS is a lot more than just servers. You're paying a premium for a reliable, flexible, scalable set of products that aren't easily re

That's perfectly true, but AWS is a lot more than just servers. You're paying a premium for a reliable, flexible, scalable set of products that aren't easily replicated by a box in a rack. For businesses with healthy margins, there's a clear tradeoff between cloud costs and opportunity costs. If you've got SLAs to honour and a lot of high-RoI engineering tasks in the queue, throwing a bunch of cloud resources at the problem might make perfect sense. AWS isn't the solution for every task, but that doesn't make it a bad solution. The obvious parallel would be with Discourse's business model. Their product is completely free and open source, so there's nothing stopping you from running their software on a DO droplet, a colocated server or a Raspberry Pi attached to your home router. They have plenty of customers who are happy to pay $100/$300/POA for a managed deployment.