No, usually the managed services are a premium over the bare hardware. When you use RDS for example, you’re paying for the compute resources but also paying fo

No, usually the managed services are a premium over the bare hardware. When you use RDS for example, you’re paying for the compute resources but also paying for the extra functionality they provide and their management and maintenance they’re doing for you. You can run your own Postgres database, or you can pay the premium for Aurora on RDS and get a multi-region setup with point in time restore and one-click scaling and automatically managed storage size and automatic patching and monitoring integrated into AWS monitoring tools and... They’re leaving money in the table because instead of using “Amazon Managed $X” potentially at a premium or paying a similar amount but in a way where AWS can provide the service with fewer compute resources than you or I would need because of their scale and thus more profitably, people look and see they’ll be paying $0.10/1000 requests and $0.05/1gb of data processed in a query and $0.10/gb for bandwidth for any transfer that leaves the region and... people just give up and go “I have no idea what that will cost or whether I can afford it, but this EC2 instance is $150/mo, I can afford that.”