It's not clear to me that the counter-party risk is _remotely_ similar between the two offerings. Someone reselling indefinite access to AWS could relatively easily set things up to go "poof" after a few years, whereas if it's your box, that's not possible. Now, critical components of the box could croak, and someone could still be screwed, but even there, you likely have more options for support than just paying Amazon's ransom.

yeah... AWS isn't going to set up anything to go poof, Oxide, despite making something awesome, will go poof if it charges too little money for it.

Amazon is expensive but not that expensive.