[adql]

> It's not really the same spot in that your paying monthly rather than upfront. Devs tend to think about total $, the business/accountants do care about Opex vs Capex.

You can buy physical servers in leasing ,turning it into opex

You can also rent them for little bit extra via managed dedicated servers from vendors like OVH.

[runlaszlorun]

I think this point isn’t made often enough.

Not going with a big cloud provider def doesn’t mean that you need to buy physical servers and build an on-prem data center.

[adql]

And other point I also seen used to lie about cloud cost is saying you save so much on engineers.

...while forgetting to have sane on-call rotation for cloud you also need at least 3 people on that rotation that are also clued in on cloud operation enough. Sure they can be "developers" but if your app architecture requires so little maintenance and flea removal that they are not doing ops jobs much, chances are so would it in either rented or dedicated server env.