AWS is not dirt cheap. It has a great value proposition in case people have a lot more money than time/expertise/etc. (So usually for one-man army startups, or startups with unlimited VC funds that want "hypergrowth", and for very high-margin high-growth/high-volume businesses where they can make a special deal with AWS, that is Netflix.)

> If anything, AWS has democratized entrepreneurial endeavors.

More likely AWS simply made a lot of money on the race to the bottom (or top) with regards to an ever faster, fatter, fancier and shinier Web. (Now everyone needs a CDN, everyone needs many PoPs, because the market forces demand this. Of course the total costs are enormous, but due to the increased scale and decades of technological changes the unit costs have gone down.)

> Most can build on Lambdas, API Gateway, and S3.

Sure, and it's great if people are aware of what kind of workload to put where. And if they build in rate limits. Otherwise they will be surprised when they run into the classic gotchas of "how we burnt all of our seed money on AWS bills".

Considering AWS dirt cheap is like considering a tesla to be dirt cheap. You're talking big money, I'm saying most people can't do that because they don't have that kind of money.

A simple colocated server nowadays can do almost a petabyte a month for less than $1000. Lookup how much that is on AWS.

Lambdas and s3 are cool until you get ddos'd and now owe way more money. Or, your software doesn't work with lambda, which is true of the overwhelming majority of services.