Beyond a certain scale, sure. But at small scale, you can completely avoid hiring an ops team, or hire a much smaller one, which can more than offset the cloud

Beyond a certain scale, sure. But at small scale, you can completely avoid hiring an ops team, or hire a much smaller one, which can more than offset the cloud provider price premium. My current company works in a niche market with a smallish number of large customers, so our scaling needs are modest. Our total AWS bill is about a third the annual salary of a single ops person. There's gotta be a very long tail of companies like mine for whom outsourcing to cloud vendors is cheaper than self-hosting.