While that may be true for the short term, what about the power, maintenance, storage etc costs that recur? I'm not sure a C dev's pay is equal to the running costs of a server farm...
People constantly repeat that, but I never see it actually be true. I frequently see people spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on hardware and hosting costs just to save $5k of developer salaries. Just because they have internalized this notion that "hardware is cheap, developers are expensive", and don't ever actually look at the numbers.