[mike_d]

Your customers don't care _why_ your service is unreasonably expensive.

Would you go to a dry cleaner that charged you $50 a shirt because "I fly the shirts to my brothers shop on the other coast to be cleaned"? Of course not.

I can think of no reason why you need to be on AWS vs a dedicated server or a stack of used Dell servers in your garage.

[narenkmano]

We did consider the option of building our own servers but getting started with AWS is much easier because we don't have to maintain our own hardware, so we went with that. This allows us to move much faster and deliver features that users want instead of optimizing costs.