[bigiain]

Some of those companies are even more eyewateringly expensive than the story in the article.

I worked on a project a few years back where the client were paying $10k/month as a "managed service" fee, on top of about $4k/month worth of platform at full on-demand prices. I showed the client how they could have it all running on reserved instances for Prod and spot instances for dev/staging for under $2k/month - but no, somebody had signed up for $14k+ per month just to have someone to blame/shout at 24x7 if something went wrong. (And that company was ~85% likely to call me and blame it on the app before they even bothered looking to see if the platform was working...)