[jandrewrogers]

AWS uses the industry standard financial model for leased infrastructure with EC2 instances: all offered pricing structures recover hardware costs at 6 months. After 6 months, your cost basis is OpEx only. The margins on month 7 and beyond are very good.

If you operate at sufficient scales to amortize the fixed overhead of operations (which is not that large of a scale), you can break even running your own server infrastructure within 12 months versus AWS if you know what you are doing. That last part is a big caveat, but not a large hurdle.

There are other considerations but in pure hardware terms, on AWS you've bought the hardware after 6 months of utilization.