> Hiring one dev ops person who can build infrastructure with code can get you really far when trying to save hosting costs early in a startup, plus it will cut down on technical debt later.

Before I moved into security, doing devops as a day gig and consulting, I heard this repeatedly from clients who would bring me in after they already had 8, 10, 12 developers; "we wish we had hired for devops sooner".

You wouldn't not provide your devs with a solid workstation, development tooling, etc. Why would you not provide them with an efficient CICD pipeline to enable them to have the highest development velocity possible?