"In terms of the costs, if you are small, the free tiers (and cloud platforms in general) are great. If you are at the point where you are paying $5-10k/month,

"In terms of the costs, if you are small, the free tiers (and cloud platforms in general) are great. If you are at the point where you are paying $5-10k/month, you are almost certainly overpaying by using cloud services." The core point, that you appear to have missed in the actual math, is that you will never personally be at that point.