If cash cost is your only consideration it might make sense to look outside of AWS. One of the big issues I see is that the feature-set and global footprint of

If cash cost is your only consideration it might make sense to look outside of AWS. One of the big issues I see is that the feature-set and global footprint of AWS is pretty much unmatched. The really sad part (for AWS competitors) is that once you get into reserved instance pricing and spot pricing, it removes a lot of the cost difference. The competition is years behind, and getting further behind every month. But that's looking at it from just a cash perspective. If your time is worth money (and you have funding), setting up things on AWS will save you a ton of money since you can take advantage of pretty good services like RDS, ELB, Elasticache, SQS, Route53, etc that will allow you to get your product to market faster with a smaller team.