This guy has a specific problem that's best solved this way. For ten years, I ran my own SQL server, DNS, web servers, game servers, etc. It was the right thing

This guy has a specific problem that's best solved this way. For ten years, I ran my own SQL server, DNS, web servers, game servers, etc. It was the right thing to do. Because I was a hobbyist. Price was everything. That's not the deal for most startups, though. You're optimizing for the search process. So optimize for the search process. Even after you've found some fit, you're still searching and attempting to grow. Everything that cuts friction from ideation to sale is pure gold. That's why the cloud rules. I don't figure out how to host the right-sized server with the right infra. I put it on GCS and BigQuery that shit. Or I snowplow into S3 and then Redshift Athena it. Two days to discovering product doesn't work. If you've ever worked at a big company, you'll know that they have strict IT ops and then a shadow IT operation that manages to be every growth opportunity that gets late merged into the real thing. You want to bypass that. You want to enable people to build things they want to build and sell those things while having automatic best practices. That's the magic of the cloud: instantaneous infrastructure, instantaneous tooling. $5k is nothing. For the gain I get from that I'd pay out of my own pocket.