> Our bill is $500K per year and we happily pay it because payroll would be way more. However it’s the richness of the toolset and on demand scalability that is

> Our bill is $500K per year and we happily pay it because payroll would be way more. However it’s the richness of the toolset and on demand scalability that is the real win. Yep. This is the value proposition. How much of a FTE's time goes to maintaining a scalable, redundant, durable queuing system on par with SQS? I can run something like 500k messages for free, with all of the same service guarantees as someone running orders of magnitude more. If I need to run an order of magnitude more? It'll cost $3.60. If our service blows up overnight and we need another order of magnitude more? There's no pagers, no alarms, no schedule getting blown up as suddenly someone needs to figure out how to scale our queuing solution to 10x capacity... it costs us $20 now. Sure at some point when I'm passing like 6.5b messages/mo I'll make up a half a non-SV FTE salary that I could instead dedicate to maintaining a queuing system... but why? Most places I've worked were much more constrained with finding good people than paying them. If it's not our core value proposition, I'd rather outsource it and have people working in stuff that adds to the value _we_ provide. That will make us way more money than saving a few bucks on infra costs.