[Jcampuzano2]

Because most companies/startups have this in-built assumption that they will eventually grow like wildfire. Obviously this is because they are selling to investors who want this to happen so they can cash out on their unicorn. So they just build it in the cloud in the first place with that in mind.

Now in some miniscule amount of cases this is true and probably did help some people who's business 100x'd overnight, but in the vast majority of cases your business just will never get to the point it needs to be "cloud scale" in the first place. Nevermind accidentally shooting yourself in the foot with a recursive lambda here and there in certain instances or a misconfuguration causing a huge bill.

Edit: Another is because lots of companies who do actually end up succeeding negotiate a shit-load of credits with cloud providers so they can basically grow their business for free for a while. That is until those credits run out and they get hit with the actual costs.

[anonylizard]

For most tech startups, when the growth period hits, its vital there must be NO DELAY to scale. Miss the timing and its permanently gone. If word of mouth leads to a sudden surge of orders, you must be able to supply the good, or you get very angry customers who walk straight into the competitors door.

Most of the value generated by startups is highly concentrated in the few that succeed. So naturally the industry should optimize itself to go big or go home, not penny pinch. That's also, why they hire expensive engineers rather than offshored developers, because speed matters more than cost.

As for non-tech companies. Their demand is more stable in the long run, but they are not tolerant of outages. Amazon cannot have its servers go down during a big sale, too many physical ongoing costs that gets wasted for every second the central nervous system is down. So the cloud is good for its reliability.