A possible middle-ground option is to use a cheaper cloud provider like Digital Ocean. You don't need dedicated infrastructure engineers and you still get a lot

A possible middle-ground option is to use a cheaper cloud provider like Digital Ocean. You don't need dedicated infrastructure engineers and you still get a lot of the same benefits as AWS, including some API compatibility (Digital Ocean's S3-alike, and many others', support S3's API). Perhaps there are some good reasons to not choose such a provider once you reach a certain scale, but they now have their own versions of a lot of different AWS services, and they're more than sufficient for my own relatively small scale.