The cost doesn't suddenly drop to zero once development is done. Typically a system of this complexity and scale requires constant maintenance. You'll need someone to be on-call (pager duty) to respond to alarms, you'll need to fix bugs, improve efficiency, apply security patches, tune alarms and metrics, etc.

In my experience you probably need a small team (6-8 people) to maintain something like this. Maybe you can consolidate some things (e.g. if your system has low on-call pressure, you may be able to merge rotations with other teams, etc.) but it doesn't go down to zero.

If you follow the various links on the Uber site, you see that they have multiple applications sitting on the same database. see https://www.uber.com/blog/schemaless-sql-database/ . It's not just 1 design of a database, with 1 application on top...