> $60 is like 30-60min at a developer’s hourly rate.

More like 4 hours of my salary (~2100 euros per month after taxes), given that I live in Eastern Europe and work for a local company.

I think that there is definitely an interesting shift in opinions towards expenditure towards software, platforms and tools. The poorer a particular nation (and its developers) are on average, the more inclined everyone is towards a mindset of "doing instead of buying", given how their own time is comparatively less valuable than paying someone else to do it.

Then again, the same applies to the software that they use, personally I pay for the Ultimate package of all the JetBrains products (their IDEs are really good), but a lot of my acquaintances only use free software, or other means of acquiring it. Kind of why a lot of Russia and other countries over there (if you look eastwards) is running on pirated Windows machines.

Curiously, that's also why something like AWS is out of reach for me and instead I use local platforms like Time4VPS, or something like Hetzner/Scaleway/Contabo.

Makes sense. I am from an even poorer ex-soviet country. I think we have zero (or very close to zero) subscriptions, use no external services for anything critical, and host everything ourselves. It's not only much cheaper, but faster as well (when the closest datacenter is 150 ms away, the difference is obvious). It also protects us in case the dictator does something stupid and we get cut off because of sanctions or inability to pay. I've seen an even stronger drive towards self-hosting since February of this year, just in case.