> Also those hardware savings will be eaten away by two days of your hourly bill

Doubt it. I've personally seen AWS bills in the tens of thousands, he's probably not that costly for a day.

I don't think I have joined a startup that pays less than 20k/month to AWS or any cloud in almost a decade.

Biggest recent ones were ~200k and ~100k that we managed to lower to ~80k with a couple months of work (but it went back up again after I left).

I fondly remember lowering our Heroku bill from 5k to 2k back in 2016 after a day of work. Management was ecstatic.

The only real startup I’ve had the privy of looking into financials had 5 figure AWS bills and literally 5 customers. Single digit customers.

And the product was sending SMS’s.

Startups are clown shows for burning OPM.

Same, but in the hundreds of thousands monthly and growing at steady clip, and AWS extending credits worth -millions-, just to keep them there because their margins are so fat and juicy they can afford that insane markup.

That's where the real value lies. Not paying these usurious amounts.

I understand the concern for sure. But we don't bill hourly in that way, as one thing our clients really appreciate is predictable costs. The fixed monthly price already includes engineering time to support your team.