Exactly, the cost of turning on additional servers is measured in ~US$100's/mth vs an engineer's time ~US$10k-25k/mth.

If you can make the problem go away by spending more in servers always do it.

For startups, the life and death is product market fit and you only get there by iterating on the business as many times as possible, not making something more efficient.

Put engineers on business iterations.