I have not yet participated in an early-stage startup that cares about cost; they have mostly cared about time, and buying Amplitude/Segment/AWS/Heroku/etc is j

I have not yet participated in an early-stage startup that cares about cost; they have mostly cared about time, and buying Amplitude/Segment/AWS/Heroku/etc is just seen as being faster than the alternatives, rightly or not. If you're rolling Postgres on the metal, your funders will either not care or they'll ask hard questions about how much time you wasted, and you'd better have some decent answers or some sympathetic investors.