[Wilya]

It's worth pointing out that, according to their team page [0], Sawhorse Media has zero dedicated backend engineers (apart from maybe their CTO). So, in their case, the alternative would be to hire someone just to manage these things (sysadmin, engineer, or whatever). In this case, I can see why they would make the choice of outsourcing everything.

But if you already have an in-house engineering team who is reasonably competent at maintaining services, the tradeoff is probably different.

[0] http://sawhorsemedia.com/team/

[berkay]

Agreed. Even when you have an in-house team, there are always other things that are core to your business to do. Growing a team is hard and expensive beyond the cost of the additional engineer. These SaaS tools let startups stay smaller, and that's priceless.