Heroku costs $20/month/dyno. You can probably compare the performance of that to a t3.nano, which is ~$4/month. An engineer costs, lets say $7000/month. Now,

Heroku costs $20/month/dyno. You can probably compare the performance of that to a t3.nano, which is ~$4/month. An engineer costs, lets say $7000/month. Now, all you have to ask is: How much time will the engineer be investing in the infra every month. Lets say you SSH in and update the system packages. 10 minutes? That's $6. Hope nothing goes wrong during the upgrade; remember, you're on the clock. Every minute you spend with that shell open is wasting money. Need to add SSH access for the new guy? Oof, we're gonna have to exchange some SSH keys, that might take 20 minutes. $12. Just got an email from AWS about a new Ubuntu AMI that fixes a security vulnerability... lets plan an upgrade. 1 hour. $30. We want to be more resilient against AWS maintenance downtime on instances, so lets bake an AMI and create an ASG. That's not too hard. Maybe a couple hours. Oh... we just paid the difference for Heroku for an entire year. AND our engineers were able to focus on the product.