[sagivo]

How much time will you spend writing custom solutions? Why would you focus on anything other than your core businesses? Why would you want to maintain servers and OSS that has nothing to do with your core businesses? I don't think doing everything yourself just to save $200/month always pays off.

[jokethrowaway]

I know your point of view is the accepted mainstream view, but I disagree and I never did it in 15 years.

Maintaining a gitlab instance, a mattermost instance, a kubernetes instance, an elk instance on a cheap VPS provider gets you in a pretty good place for very little money. Your internal tools won't need much attention until you hit a higher number of employees.

Also with three employees you can still get away with a lot of free stuff (eg. a discord or matrix server for chatting, private GitHub repos)

[majkinetor]

Because your tech solution is not NOT YOUR business - its one aspect of it, and customized solution may instead of cloud one give you higher efficiency as it is tailored specifically to your needs, plus durability as you totally control it. Cost is totally not important in that regard.

Cost of cloud solution is not comparable to cost of employee - employees build what you want, while on cloud you adapt to the solutions offered and also have to do additional cloud-related duties not relevant to your problem scope (so you payed also for the stuff you don't need).