That's what gets me about AWS.

When it came out in 2006 the m1.small was about what you'd get on a mid range desktop at that point. It cost $876 a year [0]. Today for an 8 core machine with 32 gb ram you'll pay $3145.19 [1].

It used to take 12-24 months for you to pay enough AWS bills that it would make sense to buy the hardware outright. Now it's 3 months or less for every category and people still defend this. For ML work stations it's weeks.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/dropping-prices-again-ec2-r...

[1] https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/m8g.2xlarge?region=us-e...