This is especially true at scale, even just small/medium scale (e.g. 10M records updated daily). There are dozens of services for one of the core things our bus

This is especially true at scale, even just small/medium scale (e.g. 10M records updated daily). There are dozens of services for one of the core things our business needs that are easy to use, but either a) they don't scale, or b) they do scale but at an exorbitant cost. So we've built and maintained our own system with our own hardware, in a datacenter in LA with our own dedicated 10Gb Cogent connection. As a result, we're literally 1/10 to 1/20th of the monthly cost, and it only took takes two (old) Dell 720s to run and less than $10K in total capital (network gear, etc). (We would have spent 5x that in just one month using a 3rd party service, so the "capital" was paid back almost instantly.) Many such cases.