I had this mindset for a long time that we would save money running our own infrastructure. I remember talking days with our CTO about getting dedicated servers and spinning up one of the Citrix or VMWare offerings. I was sure that we could run our backend on one dedicated server for a fraction of the equivalent on AWS. I based my assumptions on running my own infrastructure for years without issues. However, once we started growing I understood that adding resources, changing network policies, spinning test environments would be extremely difficult and would stall our growth. I am so glad they didn't listen to me.