There are two numbers that matter: days until the product is ready, profitable; days until the money runs out. Startups make decisions to improve the relationsh

There are two numbers that matter: days until the product is ready, profitable; days until the money runs out. Startups make decisions to improve the relationship between those two numbers. Using Cloud services that are obviously more expensive than self-hosted options reduces both numbers- less time to launch stuff, but less money. The point is that in early-stage startups, the costs are so low that paying an order of magnitude more for Operations may not move the second number by very much at all, since most of the money is paying for developers.