[GreedClarifies]

In isolated cases companies can reduce costs by self hosting. Usually this is a combination of very specialized requirements or shockingly technically competent early employees or founders.

However even in these exceptional cases there are hidden costs that will likely arise.

For most companies the very concept of self hosting is comical. This is a one way train.

[kkielhofner]

By it's very nature HN is pretty startup focused (you're talking about founders). When I say "greenfield" I'm mostly talking about a startup (and beyond) that's survived the ~first year of chaos/infant mortality - which should be well before the significant technical debt of the solution and Hotel California nature of cloud take hold.

For an established real business there's almost no question.

Do you have any experience with self-hosting and examples of hidden costs? In my experience with both and hybrid approaches cloud has substantially more dramatic hidden costs. From a cost and pricing perspective cloud has many more foot guns - it's routine at this point for people to report exceeding their monthly budgets and billing notifications literally overnight.