[nine_k]

It's interesting to compare how soon the VPS's total cost will reach the coat of an MBP. Even a relatively beefy VPS which is $30 / mo is only $360 / year, like a cheap used Linux laptop.

On the other hand, it has much much less CPU than an MBP, and usually no GPU at all.

On the third hand, the cloud allows one to quickly start more VMs, and to shut them down as quickly, something that's possible but a bit more limited on a laptop / desktop.

[Nanana909]

Why pay for a whole month though? Depending on your work, spin it up and down as needed. If you're just building a binary you only need it up for minutes or seconds. Been on my mind lately. Lot more sandboxing too. And if you want to build fast you can just scale up your instance since its so short lived. Want to switch from x86 to ARM? no problem. Spin up 40 of your current app? no problem.

[nine_k]

That's fair. But above I read about a dev box with Emacs running on it, etc. You likely don't want it to be too short-lived. You can switch it off during night, of course!

[mark_l_watson]

I especially like having a few VPSs on GCP, each with specific software installed. For example, I have one with Clojure and Python bridge set up. I rarely spin these up, but the disk charges are cheap so I can just leave them in a halter state until I need them.