[jkat]

The cost can be so out of whack that it can become cheaper to hire talent. Two things make this truer: the person might have spare time to do other things, and sensitivity to things that PaaS are poor at: raw processing speed, memory or SSDs.

I've seen it over and over again with SaaS: server monitoring, logs, statistics, ...

We had an internal fight recently about how to manage our logs. Group A wanted to spend thousands a month on Splunk. Group B spent a weekend setting up logstash + kibana and deploying it in production.

Server monitoring? Nagios. Stats? statsd+graphite. Even if you have to outsource setting it up, it'll probably be cheaper from the very first month.