Absolutely. At several startups, getting a simple €20–50/month Hetzner server meant rounds with leadership and a little dance with another department to hand over a credit card. With AWS, leadership suddenly accepted that Ops/Dev could provision what we thought was right. It isn’t logically compelling, but that’s why the cloud gained traction so quickly: it removed friction.

> At several startups, getting a simple €20–50/month Hetzner server meant rounds with leadership and a little dance with another department to hand over a credit card.

That's not a startup if you can't go straight to the founder and get a definite yes/no answer in a few minutes.