[ksec]

For a company that makes "tens of millions in annual profits " in 2020, this doesn't seems much at all.

They had around 60 employees, which put the salary and expenses on employees close to 12M a year.

Assuming the "tens" were minimum at 20M, their revenue would be around ~$35M.

[dekhn]

Yeah, I read a lot of these "cloud is expensive" posts and I wonder: did you ever run a real on-prem data center with 24/7 staffing for both the hardware and the software? When you compute the fully loaded costs (and the opportunity value of being able to scale) cloud is really not obscenely expensive, although (as many others report) premier services definitely are priced to make a fat profit for amazon.

I spend in cloud to ensure we're not the bottleneck in the org- we pay our scientists, engineers, and labs far more money than we spend on cloud.