I can’t understate this enough. A client will often go with a platform solution that is 80% of what they need than the bespoke one simply because it avoids 3-6

I can’t understate this enough. A client will often go with a platform solution that is 80% of what they need than the bespoke one simply because it avoids 3-6 months of procurement delay. Even if you develop a novel infrastructure technology, AWS’ implementation will be better in the eyes of a corporation because it comes from AWS. You’re right; these platform services are often more expensive — but the critical thing is that the company gets a management benefit from this in that their existing tool stack around things like IaC or CI/CD will mostly just work. They can easily use the security standards and setup they already have without having to run the solution through a full security review or build a bunch of tooling around a third-party product. The only exception to this is when we’re talking about revenue-generating activity driven by the business. Often differentiating tech is needed there, but it’s also the same situation with platforms like SAP and Salesforce sucking most of the oxygen out of the room. But infrastructure is a particularly bad place to be as a software vendor right now; even the “success stories” like Snowflake are running into headwinds competing with platform services. TLDR: time to market is the main reason pushing people to platform services. This is making it increasingly difficult for ISVs / SaaS — even large ones — to make inroads to displace their competition.