[acdha]

I don't think it's that simple: AWS offers a ton of higher-level services — if you just need a Linux VM, yes, you have many options — but otherwise you're getting into tradeoffs like how many hours of human time it's worth spending to build the equivalent of a managed service. This can look like you're spending more because you get an itemized bill from AWS every month but you rarely get your staff time broken down like that and especially do not get an itemized report of what they could have been working on instead.

That's not saying that the right answer is AWS: simply that you really need to balance your budget against your time and capacity. For example, ALBs are “just” load-balancing — but if you try to build your own system with automatic failover and scaling, the various tools for logging, security, etc. it'll cost a lot more than $16/month. Now, if you're running 1,000 ALBs maybe that might no longer be true — but I would bet that you have other tasks for your engineers which would see comparable or greater returns, so it's still a business decision.