AWS is great if you have lots of money and little time. Which was very true in the last ~decade, where we had lots of venture funded startups that had very much

AWS is great if you have lots of money and little time. Which was very true in the last ~decade, where we had lots of venture funded startups that had very much money, but little time. Also, while you definitely pay a markup, the standard EC2 pricing also contains instant availability. If you skip on buying a car and instead pay a taxi to wait 24/7, your costs will also be insanely high. Additionally, AWS provides a great ecosystem where your app can easily be managed in - things like getting a https certificate, setting up a redundant load balancer and even a CDN, database or a Kubernetes cluster can be made simply with a few clicks in an UI. If you don't have someone who knows how to configure those services, it can detract a lot from what you're actually trying to do as a business. Lastly, it has all these enterprise features you suddenly need - solid billing, encryption, certificates etc.. Don't get me wrong, it's expensive, but there's a reason so many businesses use AWS.