Sounds like we need a specialist.

I guess those promises about needing fewer expensive people never materialised.

tbh, aside from the really anaemic use-cases where everything actually manages to scale to zero and has very low load: I have genuinely never seen an AWS project (outside of free credits of course) that works out cheaper than what came before.

That's TCO from PNLs, not a "gut feeling". We have a decade of evidence now.