[rglullis]

If you were running a startup that had at least 1 paid developer, the cost of outsourcing these services were a rounding error compared to the actual salaries. If you wanted to skimp on these other things, you'd be saving maybe 2% of your budget.

Now, these supporting services can quickly become more expensive than the cost of a subscription to a powerful coding agent. You can get a beefy server on Hetzner for less than $50/month, self-host all of that and run entirely on open source alternatives. This is on the same order of magnitude as the cost of your LLM subscription. You can (theoretically) have your whole IT operations costing you a few hundred bucks per month.