If you are an engineer with 1% of equity, more power to you. In all the companies I've worked at, the influence of the cloud provider bill on the eventual worth

If you are an engineer with 1% of equity, more power to you. In all the companies I've worked at, the influence of the cloud provider bill on the eventual worth of my options has been lower than my annual beer costs. The #1 benefit of options for startups is that they shift engineering costs from now to the future, so that you can hire any engineers at all while operating on a small budget. If the business works out, you already have so much money that the cost of the options will be negligible. If the business doesn't work out, the cost of the options was zero.