I've been building since the 90s too, and I sort of agree with you, but it's a spectrum. I'll start at the top, at the enterprise level. At that level it make

I've been building since the 90s too, and I sort of agree with you, but it's a spectrum. I'll start at the top, at the enterprise level. At that level it makes sense to bias towards buying instead of building for anything that you can buy cheaper than build+maintain, because there is no reason to distract yourself from where your business adds value. Lock-in isn't really a concern, because when you get big enough, their competitors will bend over backwards to help you solve that problem. You don't even have to be that big -- at one point Azure offered to provide full time engineers to help reddit move from AWS and that was many years ago when reddit was a lot smaller. At the earliest stages, it makes sense to use all the SaaS products. You don't have the time and resources to build it, but they all have cheap or free tiers, so you can afford to buy it. Lock in isn't a huge concern because your data is small enough that even manually moving it isn't that big a deal. In the SMB range is where it gets hardest -- on the one hand you may not have resources to buy because you're beyond the free tier, but you may also not have the resources to build and you may be worried about data lock in. Hopefully by the time you get to this stage, you can predict which parts of the business will become critical and which are nice to have, and start transitioning off of the SaaS products for critical products that make sense to build in house.