The cost can be so out of whack that it can become cheaper to hire talent. Two things make this truer: the person might have spare time to do other things, and

The cost can be so out of whack that it can become cheaper to hire talent. Two things make this truer: the person might have spare time to do other things, and sensitivity to things that PaaS are poor at: raw processing speed, memory or SSDs. I've seen it over and over again with SaaS: server monitoring, logs, statistics, ... We had an internal fight recently about how to manage our logs. Group A wanted to spend thousands a month on Splunk. Group B spent a weekend setting up logstash + kibana and deploying it in production. Server monitoring? Nagios. Stats? statsd+graphite. Even if you have to outsource setting it up, it'll probably be cheaper from the very first month.