If I generalize, I see two kinds of groups for whom this reduction of cost does not matter. The first group are VC-funded, and the second group are in charge of +million AWS bill. We do not have anything in common with these companies, but we have something in common with 80% of readers on this forum and 80% of AWS clients.
We're also bootstrapped and use Hetzner, not AWS (except for the occasional test), for very much the same reasons as you.
And we are also fully infrastructure as code using Ansible.
We used to be a pure software vendor, but are bringing out a devtool where the free tier runs on Hetzner. But with traction, as we build out higher tier services, it's an open question on what infrastructure to host it on.
There are a kazillion things to consider, not the least of which is where the user wants us to be.
Two reasons for this stick out:
- Are the multi-million dollar SV seed rounds distorting what real business costs are? Counting dev salaries etc. (if there is at least one employee) it doesn't seem worth the effort to save $20k - i.e., 1/5 of a dev salary? But for a bootstrapped business $20k could definitely be existential.
- The important number would be the savings as percent of net revenue. Is the business suddenly 50% more profitable? Then it's definitely worth it. But in terms of thinking about positively growing ARR doing cost/benefit on dropping AWS vs. building a new (profitable) feature I could see why it might not make sense.
Edit to add: it's easy to offhand say "oh yeah easy, just get to $2M ARR instead of saving $20k- not a big deal" but of course in the real world it's not so simple and $20k is $20k. The prevalent SV mindset of just spending without thinking too much about profitability is totally delusional except for like 1 out of 10000 startups.