Last time I ran the math, it made sense for us to provision bare metal for 70% of our baseload, but our regions skew EU/US

With the peak load being about 10x the still load, the dedicated servers should cost 10% of the cloud version.

We'd likely have to have some reserve just in case our marketing and product do so well that the next peak of the load rises higher in absolute terms.

Hybrid approaches are also really good, but I'm gonna be honest: If capital is not an issue and the growth is to be expected, I wouldn't steer into dedicated server region. It's just such an headache if it's not the core business

Dedicated servers are way less of a headache than cloud in my experience. Unless you are talking about buying and building your own hardware, which is a completely separate thing and not generally recommended. You can lease dedicated servers these days as easily as launching a cloud compute instance but way less than half the price. I pay around $265/mo for 32 cores and 128gb of ram with local, dual, mirrored 1tb SSD drives. Looks like a reserved instance with similar performance on AWS would be somewhere around $700/mo.