>You also have to think about the cost of hosting, maintaining, monitoring, etc. Well, for a development environment, the costs of all that should be zero, in

>You also have to think about the cost of hosting, maintaining, monitoring, etc. Well, for a development environment, the costs of all that should be zero, in terms of dollars. In terms of time, you'll have to spend some time maintaining your development environment, whether you have it in the cloud or locally. Adding a monetary cost to that just seems foolish. Remember, we're not talking about deploying to the cloud. We're talking about developing on the cloud. Spending real money, in addition to my time for a project that I'm going to open source or possibly abandon is foolish.