- They’ll leverage GDPR to make it only possible to comply to all privacy standards (SOC, credit card management…) if you use AWS,

- Worse, they’ll provide special Linux repos with vulnerability fixes that only they provide. Log4j can make all your distributions obsolete in a single day, and only Amazon Linux users will have that patch, this quickly.

- Then insurances will stop covering people who deploy their software manually, because vulnerabilities are too prone to happen.

The costs are bearable for early-stage startups that are mostly typical web applications with little resource requirements, or bigger startups that have so much VC money they are happy to burn it, but beyond these two scenarios clouds are very bad value for money.

Tradeoffs that will dominate the costs

1. Are you using a fast language or a slow language? (10-100x cost difference)

2. Are you using an efficient storage format such as parquet? (10-100x cost difference)

3. Are you using a reasonably efficient query planner job processor? (1-10x cost difference).

4. Are you using a good algorithm for the data processing task? meaning a good efficient SQL, An efficient imperitive algorithm etc. (unbounded cost difference)

The above tradeoffs will have a cost difference of up to 10^5 ( or greater depending on point 4). Once you account for risk, utilization, capex, and people costs. The cost difference between different compute platforms is usually negligible to the above points.

Cloud providers cut compute/storage costs every few years. You can get long term contracts with them that have heavy discounts for guaranteed spend. Switching compute instance types is pretty cheap, and switching compute platforms is relatively low cost when the time comes. Meaning that investors can generally expect your compute costs to fall YoY all else being equal.

Building out your own compute generally means adding new headcount to deal with colo things such as vender management, technical details such as networking, capes/opex management, and finally hardware selection. The odds that the hardware you select perfectly matches the compute you need in 2 years is low. The odds that a cloud provider has made a cheaper compute option in 2 years are moderate. The odds that your app needs something that’s available trivially in a cloud provider are high.