Yup. The cost is so irrelevant, its a little laughable how many other people keep bringing it up. The relevant metrics are People and Risk. If you host your own

Yup. The cost is so irrelevant, its a little laughable how many other people keep bringing it up. The relevant metrics are People and Risk. If you host your own VM; ok, maybe it works great for you and you don't have to touch it. But the future risk of something bad happening is High. And when that does happen, if an engineer has to take 1 day to fix it, you'll have literally paid the difference for a PaaS for the rest of the year. But, again, cost doesn't matter. What really matters is that engineer had to WASTE a day working on it. That's a day that could have been spent advancing the product toward market fit. That's a day when that engineer wasn't coordinating with the rest of the team. That sets back her work by a day, which might block another engineer by a day, and it ripples down and down. That's not something startups want to happen. Because Engineers are expensive, yes, but more importantly, they're hard to find. You can't just throw money at hiring talent like you can at Heroku (or App Engine, or Lambda, or whatever works best for your business).