The biggest cost for growth companies is opportunity cost: what they aren't able to sell and deliver because of constraints in their development and operational

The biggest cost for growth companies is opportunity cost: what they aren't able to sell and deliver because of constraints in their development and operational setup. If you have customers beating down your door to buy your product after you add n+1 feature, you can find investors to eat the extra operational cost without a problem as long as you can build n+1 fast enough that those customers don't go elsewhere. The other element is elastic workload, of course. Having the application dynamically scale across a pool of machines in as tractable a manner as possible at the developer level can be an enormous cost saving all on its own. Instead of allocating machines based on individual high water marks, you can allocate a cluster based on the sum of average usage + as many standard deviations of resource usage to get as many 9s as you need.