I wrote a part of our product, actually invested years in it, that does a certain thing I won't say on Amazon's cloud. One day, Amazon released a competing ser

I wrote a part of our product, actually invested years in it, that does a certain thing I won't say on Amazon's cloud. One day, Amazon released a competing service that does the same thing. There was a flaw in our product that had one of our customers pushing to use Amazon's offering. Turns out Amazon's service cost about 4x what it cost us to do it ourselves. It wasn't obvious at the time given Amazon's purposefully obtuse pricing. Eventually we fixed the bug, brought our customer back in line with the rest, saved some money, and have continued providing this service much cheaper than Amazon. I think it works for us because of a few reasons: 1. The service we offer is challenging enough that most dev teams won't want to do it themselves, they'll outsource it 2. Amazon has little incentive to charge less (see #1), little competition 3. We're small enough that we can still provide that face-to-face level of service and hand holding that's nearly impossible to get from a larger org Amazon/Microsoft/Google may come into a particular market, but it doesn't automatically imply that they can (or even will) do it better/cheaper/faster.