It's all very relative and depends on your operational complexity. If what you are building is working fine with VMs and you don't see negative impact on your b

It's all very relative and depends on your operational complexity. If what you are building is working fine with VMs and you don't see negative impact on your business from operating it yourself, then sure - why fix what's not broken? But for thousands of small businesses out there, not speaking of medium and large ones, cloud providers replace one or more full time employees who'd otherwise be busy maintaining and supporting their stacks. You can do the math. From that point of view AWS & co are dirt cheap.