I mean most of my projects are not massive, they cater to up to ~10K or so people. Running EC2 or dedicated server somewhere else would be a lot for me, a singl

I mean most of my projects are not massive, they cater to up to ~10K or so people. Running EC2 or dedicated server somewhere else would be a lot for me, a single developer, to take on myself. However using Lambda, API Gateway, CloudFront, SQS, DynamoDB, S3, and more (sometimes also with PlanetScale for my DB) is a really nice stack and the costs are tiny (I'm talking <$30mo in my busy months and <$10 in my slower months, I write event-based software so it's very burst-y). To run an equivalent stack myself would require significant effort (upfront and ongoing) and I'm not sure I could get the costs that low. Another great aspect of my stack is it's all scales on it's own without any intervention on my part. What you are comfortable using is a sliding scale with some people thinking if you aren't hosting it in your own datacenter then you are crazy all the way up to "let's just use Firebase" (or similar). For me I've found that buying in fully can be very enjoyable and the risk is rather low (for me).