[Nextgrid]

> startups wouldn't be paying a third of the money they raised to AWS

They're paying that because they and their investors want to. If you look beyond that it's absolutely possible to get that infrastructure at a tenth of the AWS cost by going with old-school bare-metal providers such as OVH or Hetzner, but then it means you no longer get to brag about how you wrangle (self-inflicted) complexity with Terraform and tons of YAML files at the next AWS conference.