Sub-linear scaling is powerful. Think about how costs scale in relation to use of a service. If you are paying someone else for the service as a package, the

Sub-linear scaling is powerful. Think about how costs scale in relation to use of a service. If you are paying someone else for the service as a package, the costs scale linearly, or some close approximation of that. AWS gives you a small discount if you have larger volumes for some services, but these are essentially a rounding error. If instead you launch a similar service in house, your costs are often dramatically lower per unit the more units you use. You start with a small team supporting a system with some large capacity you're not using yet because you need room to grow, and you realize large steps along the way where you can handle tens or hundreds of times the volume you see at each staffing level. Buying hardware or developing custom software gets cheaper at volume. This is sub-linear scaling.