[jacquesm]

Because I have fairly extensive insight into a very large number of companies and can see their license bills as well as their cloud bills if those are applicable. Compared to that doing a startup on an open source stack using dedicated machines eventually turns out much cheaper. It's like getting hooked on drugs.

The most cost effective way as far as I can see is to hire a sysadmin on a freelance basis until you need one full time, own your own hardware (or lease it by the month until you can afford your own hardware) and pay flat rate for bandwidth. Anything else will sooner or later come to haunt you and then you will need to migrate to some new platform. At that point in time you will learn the true value of the words 'lock-in'.