Regarding dedicated dev VMs: You might be able to save a few dollars if the developers can run their VMs locally on their dev machine, e.g. with docker or docke

Regarding dedicated dev VMs: You might be able to save a few dollars if the developers can run their VMs locally on their dev machine, e.g. with docker or docker-compose. Downside: Maybe not equivalent to production environment; creating the setup costs time (salary). Regarding production VMs: How much do you expect to save by moving to self-managing everything? I’d expect a few dollars saved for the hardware, but a huge amount of time spent setting everything up and documenting it properly. Net loss. Let me tell you, I host a B2B app on Hetzner because I cannot use typical cloud providers due to GDPR, and I hate it. So much fiddling around to get everything working and I still don’t have high availability because I don’t have the expertise in that area. It’s a huge time sink and takes significant time away from actual development. Conclusion: Use your time and money wisely. Do what speeds up adding value to the business. Saving a few pennies but missing out on growth and recurring revenue is a bad deal.