> 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.