[ordiel]

"The combined bill" during which time period?

1 Month, for sure. What about 1 year? Also did those companies required to provide any training or hiring to achieve that? Because you also need to add that to the cost comparison

If you are comparing one month bill agains 1 time purchase (which if is correctly chosen should not happen but once every 10 years at the earliest) for sure it will be cheaper. When it comes down to scalability, development and deployment, you should check your tech stack rather than your infrastructure. Kubernetees and containerization should easily take care of those with on premise hardware while also reducing complexity + you will no longer have to worry for off the chart network transit fees