If you have enough hard technical changes due to changes in monetization model or similar it might not even have any extra expenses. I think the company I curre

If you have enough hard technical changes due to changes in monetization model or similar it might not even have any extra expenses. I think the company I currently work for might have been bankrupt by now (after due to a marked change our original monetization strategy started to dry up) if we hadn't taken advantage of the flexibility of the cloud. (But then we still might not make it, but at least we had a chance to make it which I don't see us having had we tried to have our own dedicated hardware.) Then there are also some highly managed/opinionated "cloud providers" (e.g. not aws), while they tend to have even more absurd prices for compute power they tend to actually safe quite a bit man power (in difference to e.g. AWS where the person time savings seam to be completely eaten up by subtle complexity and need for optimizing deployments in ways you otherwise would not need to). Which can make them attractive for very small startups which very low compute requirements. Through such startups also tend to not have calssical VC.