The implicit claims are more misleading, in my opinion: The claim that self-hosting is free or nearly free in terms of time and engineering brain drain.
The real cost of self-hosting, in my direct experience with multiple startup teams trying it, is the endless small tasks, decisions, debates, and little changes that add up over time to more overhead than anyone would have expected. Everyone thinks it’s going to be as simple as having the colo put the boxes in the rack and then doing some SSH stuff, then you’re free of those AWS bills. In my experience it’s a Pandora’s box of tiny little tasks, decisions, debates, and “one more thing” small changes and overhauls that add up to a drain on the team after the honeymoon period is over.
If you’re a stable business with engineers sitting idle that could be the right choice. For most startups who just need to get a product out there and get customers, pulling limited headcount away from the core product to save pennies (relatively speaking) on a potential AWS bill can be a trap.
> The implicit claims are more misleading, in my opinion: The claim that self-hosting is free or nearly free in terms of time and engineering brain drain.
Not only is that not an implicit claim in the post, they explicitly say the that it's not free, it's actually just around the same amount of time they used to spend with AWS:
> Total toil is ~14 engineer-hours/month, including prep. The AWS era had us spending similar time but on different work: chasing cost anomalies, expanding Security Hub exceptions, and mapping breaking changes in managed services. The toil moved; it did not multiply.
As for the following:
> If you’re a stable business with engineers sitting idle that could be the right choice. For most startups who just need to get a product out there and get customers, pulling limited headcount away from the core product to save pennies (relatively speaking) on a potential AWS bill can be a trap.
You're just agreeing with them:
> Cloud-first was the right call for our first five years. Bare metal became the right call once our compute footprint, data gravity, and independence requirements stabilised.
> The claim that self-hosting is free or nearly free in terms of time and engineering brain drain.
Free? No, it's not free. It only costs less engineering time than AWS.