[stackskipton]

Not always. Employing Sysadmins doesn't mean Hetzner is cheaper because those "Sysadmin/Ops type people" are being hired to managed the Kubernetes cluster. And Ops type people who truly know Kubernetes are not cheap.

Sure, you can get away with legoing some K3S stuff together for a while but one major outage later, and that cost saving might have entirely disappeared.

[srockets]

More than that: the more you use, the more discounts you can get from a major CSP, which would also reduce the TCO for using a managed service.