Comment by miki123211
9 hours ago
You can trade off cloud costs for developer time.
AWS is priced as if your alternative was doing everything in house, with Silicon Valley salaries. If your goal isn't "go to market quickly and make sure our idea works, no matter the cost", it may not be the right fit for you. If you're a solo developer, non-profit, or another organization with excess volunteer time and little money, you can very often do what AWS does for a fraction of the cost.
I've found that for data-intensive workloads it isn't just a trade-off—the markup on egress and storage often makes the business model mathematically unviable. I'm bootstrapping a service with heavy image generation and the unit economics simply don't work on AWS.