Exactly. AWS has its own quirks and frustrations, sure but at the end of the day, I’m not using AWS just for raw compute. I’m paying for the entire ecosystem around it: security and access management, S3, Lambda, networking, monitoring, reliability guarantees, and a hundred little things that quietly keep the lights on.

People can have different opinions on this, of course, but personally, if I have a choice, I'd rather not be juggling both product development and the infrastructure headaches that come with running everything myself. That trade-off isn’t worth it for me.