> I have dozens of stories of startup teams spinning their wheels with self-hosting strategies that turn into a big waste of time and headcount that they should have been using to grow their businesses instead.

Funnily enough, the article even affirms this, though most people seemed to have skimmed over it (or not read it at all).

> 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.

Unless you've got uncommon data egress requirements, if you're worried about optimizing cloud spend instead of growing your business in the first 5 years you're almost certainly focusing on the wrong problem.

> You really need to weigh the tradeoffs, but many people are not equipped to do that. They just think their chosen solution will be perfect and the other side will be the bad one.

This too. Most of the massive AWS savings articles in the past few days have been from companies that do a massive amount of data egress i.e. video transfer, or in this case log data. If your product is sending out multiple terabytes of data monthly, hosting everything on AWS is certainly not the right choice. If your product is a typical n-tier webapp with database, web servers, load balancer, and some static assets, you're going to be wasting tons of time reinventing the wheel when you can spin up everything with redundancy & backups on AWS (or GCP, or Azure) in 30 minutes.