The thing is, Dropbox talent level is probably quite high. Thus, they can build a lot of internal APIs to manage their own hardware (Think: Software Defined Net

The thing is, Dropbox talent level is probably quite high. Thus, they can build a lot of internal APIs to manage their own hardware (Think: Software Defined Networking, Kubernetes, lambda-like platform, programatic scheduler, etc). If you don't have people who can provide cloud-like APIs to developers to self-serve, then you are trading off your developer time with money. And I'd argue that is a terrible trade off.