[mega_dingus]

It's about TCO and time to market. Depending on what you're building, it's all YMMV. This article just quotes some individual costs

As somebody who worked at a mid-tier company trying to run databases, I can attest that RDS was a godsend. Trying to hire both a DBA and an Ops team that knew how to write the chef cookbooks for a proper multi-node cluster postgres was a nightmare. Like, we never succeeded, and something that's ootb with RDS

You must not forget that also, many (most?) companies that run things themselves do not do it right. Like, with proper off-site backups that you're regularly testing and know you have options to easily spin up replicas or restore point-in-time backups

Jeff Atwood's been saying this from the initial SO podcasts from 2008. If you have the right people who are motivated, and provide the right equipment and resources, you've always had the opportunity to have lower TCO doing it yourself

I have since moved on to a small top-tier company and still prefer to "outsource" my DBA work by way of using Aurora. Yes Aurora is more expensive. No, I don't have the mental or monetary budget to hire up a proper ops team. I know my limits