You don't need to 'believe'. You need to do an analysis of what you need and how much each option will cost. Then you can know.
If your argument is "I believe onprem saves money" or "I bet AWS is cheaper" or "Jim Morrison came to me in a dream and said I should use Azure" then you haven't done enough research.
the research isn't free either. The more indepth and time it takes to do such research, the slower you come to a decision and ship.
Cloud allows you to ship fast. It allows you to go without research - just accept the marketing, and pay up.
You pay above-cost (compared to on-prem) when you grow to a certain size. But this is usually a worthy trade off tbh.
Even the same number of "technical specialists" doesn't mean it's the same if one option lets you move faster or remain more reliable.
To be fair most businesses probably don't need it, but it is worth taking into account.
However, as someone put it, put your money where your mouth is. Become a contractor offering to reduce storage cost in exchange for 10% of the savings. You should be a millionaire in now time according to your own narrative.
It's a capex vs opex question. For financial quackery reasons, accountants and stock markets prefer having less people on the direct payroll, which is why everything not part of the "core business" is outsourced - even if it is more expensive in either short or long term.
Cloud makes a ton of sense for high growth companies. If your infrastructure is mostly static, that's when it makes sense to go to a datacenter. Or if you have one very specific use case, like Dropbox.
Do you recall what the big savings were in? Compute, storage, DB etc? Be really interested to understand why this case is so different to many I've read.
Data Center (per month)
Servers: $6K
Cabinet (x3): $15K
Bandwidth: $2.5K
Support: N/A
Total: $23.5K
EC2 (per month)
Servers: $13K
Storage: $1.5K
Bandwidth: $1.1K
Support: $1.2K
Total: $16.8K
At the time we and Heroku were running the two largest Postgres clusters on EC2.
This is the traditional “sell” for cloud computing and I don’t buy it at all.
The clouds would have you believe it doesn't make sense to run your own systems because you need too much specialist expertise to run your own systems.
The clouds sales pitch is the if you go cloud then you don’t need all these specialists.
That’s rubbish. Cloud operations need the same or more headcount if technical specialists, they’re just doing different things.
The old “don’t run your own systems, it’s cheaper and easier to go cloud” is just sales fiction.
Don’t believe it.