> How quickly can you scale up your design 10x? 100x?

Who needs to scale 100x in a matter of hours? For those companies, AWS may be very useful.

My entire point is that not everyone needs all the functionality AWS provides, and that’s where you can save the money.

Scaling really isn't that big of a deal. 99.99% of companies do not "scale" very fast at all. Most large deployments are grown organically over months or years.

Flexibility is a much bigger factor in using the cloud.

It is one an the same problem - money/time trade-off. Which one is worth more to you? It depends.

I've worked at organisations where "get N extra servers" was a 6-8 month process. Because of this you have to be extremely good at capacity planning.

And very few organisations are good at these guessing games.

Either you over-provision with a generous safety margin; or you don't - and your fail to handle peak loads.