Somewhere there's a break point between a few hundred a month on AWS, and a few tens of thousand a month. If my startup needs, say, a pair of redundant app ser

Somewhere there's a break point between a few hundred a month on AWS, and a few tens of thousand a month. If my startup needs, say, a pair of redundant app servers, a redundant (MultiAZ) database, a load balancer, some object storage, and the "wrappings" around that (like ssl certs, dns, vpcs for security/isolation, monitoring and alerting and dashboards, security groups for access control, decent access control and role management for platform/admin users) - that's less than $200 a month and will see better than 99.99% (assuming your app doesn't drag that down). That's a _total_ no brainer. All that stuff in the list in brackets there is free (or so cheap as to not matter). There's no way a startup with less than maybe 25 or even 100 engineers should consider standing all that up and supporting it themselves. Sure, you could do it cheaper, but the _most_ you could save is $200/month, and there's tens off thousands of engineers who already know how to do all that either from the AWS web console or via AWS APIs. By the time you've hit $30k/month, the question is much less clear. $360k a year is a _lot_ of money, but even if you could save 90% of your hardware/hosting cost it's not enough to pay 2 senior engineers, let alone a team big enough to have 24x7x365 on-call. If you have the right team, you can probably keep a bare metal dedicated server platform running and secure and approaching 99.9% uptime, especially if you have someone (or hire someone) specifically with the skill to do that. But you still need to decide if it's worthwhile for you to have that skilled person wrangling servers instead of writing code that adds features that get you closer to product/market fit. You're 100% right that if you've only got $200k runway, spending 30k of it a month making Jeff rich is a bad plan (except for Jeff). But if you've built a thing that actually _needs_ $30k of AWS resources a month to run but isn't bringing in enough money to help extend it's runway, your business plan is bad.