You mist have fit into the free egress tier. Maybe something that could be cached by Cloudflare or similar?

The egress costs for AWS, GCE, and Azure are usually the big cost driver.

Was a b2b app with ARPU of say $100. Our total all in hardware cost for that same user was maybe $.10.

So saving on server cost literally did nothing. Our employee cost where 20x, 100x our hardware costs.

Not all startups aim for millions of free uses you will make money off of later.

Definitely. But if hardware is the only expense that scales per user – as is with most B2C apps, and even many B2B products – the difference between GCP and bare metal can make you last a lot longer on the same seed round.

(The show Silicon Valley actually showed that part quite well)

Except as I told you not always.

If we optimized and saved $100 per month on hardware at the cost of even 1 engineer hour, it would be a net loss.

I think a LOT of startups are very simple from the hardware level. You can go real far on just a few servers. And at that level, who care who manages them? Do what is easier.