[notatoad]

running a VM where? on an ec2 instance? who's going to keep that updated for me? who's going to reprovision it when aws retires the underlying hardware? who's going to monitor it for PCI compliance for me? i don't want to deal with all that. i could dump it on fargate, but at that point it's barely cheaper than just using the official version.

i've had to look at my nat gateway zero times since i set it up a couple years ago. i can't say that about any VM host i've got. to me, that's easily worth the few dollars a month that aws charges for it. it's cheaper than hiring somebody, and it's cheaper than me.

[moduspol]

It costs a lot more than a few bucks when you’re putting a lot of traffic through it. And running your own NAT instance does not incur per-GB traffic costs.

That said, the paid NAT gateways do also publish metrics. That can be nice when debugging a legitimate issue, such as when your gateway actually runs out of NAT ports to use.

[eqvinox]

> i don't want to deal with all that

The market will provide. In this case by increasing prices to the point of maximum value extraction from people who don't want to deal with all that. There's a high initial cost to moving to something else here, with a lot of people dragging along paying more than what the market would otherwise equalize to, out of avoiding that initial hurdle. (And long term commitment of a resource, of course, one with low average but indeterminate excursion cost.)

[notatoad]

the market has provided. they provided me with a managed NAT gateway service for a price that i'm willing to pay.