Great comment. I agree it's a spectrum and those of us who are comfortable on (4) like yourself and probably us at Carolina Cloud [0] as well, (4) seems like a no brainer. But there's a long tail of semi-technical users who are more comfortable in 2-3 or even 1, which is what ultimately traps them into the ransomware-adjacent situation that is a lot of the modern public cloud. I would push back on "usage-based". Yes it is technically usage-based but the base fee also goes way up and there are also sometimes retainers on these services (ie minimum spend). So of course "usage-based" is not wrong but what it usually means is "more expensive and potentially far more expensive".

[0] https://carolinacloud.io, derek@

The problem is that clouds have easily become 3 or 5 times the price of managed services, 10x the price of option 3, and 20x the price of option 4. To say nothing of the fact that almost all businesses can run fine on "pc under desk" type situations.

So in practice cloud has become the more expensive option the second your spend goes over the price of 1 engineer.