[leros]

To your first point, I think you have to start valuing your time when analyzing the cost. If you have a small growing SaaS, is spending $100-200/mo for hosting really a big deal? Think about the cost of your time. I will gladly pay that kind of hosting cost to not have to spend time doing devops on my small product. I'd rather spend that time on feature development or marketing.

I think your second point is debatable. We used to spend something like $50-100k a year on Heroku which is technically way overpriced, but hiring even a single devops person to move us to AWS would have been much more expensive and introduced all sorts of risk. I think a medium sized company is fine paying $100-300k to something like Heroku as long as the offerings are fitting the architectural needs. And Heroku is AWS so you can always use some AWS services alongside your Heroku stuff.