5 digits of USD per month. Whereas normal on-prem hosting can be started with almost no dollar cost, tomorrow.

Right now they/we can't do it though, the talent is there but that talent is super busy reworking software that's no longer well-adapted to their new requirements. We'll see if the topic becomes more relevant in the future.

Not to forget - there are more choices than big-cloud and host-everything-yourself.

One can rent VMs from Hetzner at 1/3 the price of AWS (and 1/10 the data transfer fees). No managed services, like Dynamo or S3, but will full convenience of on-demand scale-up

Or, for mid-sized corporations - buying a rack of computers, wiring them together, and installing OpenStack to make an internal cloud - that isn't some black magic wizardry either

Oh yeah, completely agreed. As mentioned in another comment we might just go Hetzner and buy a singular server in another provider for backup and failover. We'd likely be just fine with 6-7 of the smaller Hetzner servers, too.

It seems crazy that you are paying that much for hosting something that can be self-hosted on an old laptop.