> The number of staff needed to manage a cloud infrastructure is definitely lower than that required to manage the equivalent self-hosted infrastructure.

There's probably a sweet spot where that is true, but because cloud providers offer more complexity (self-inflicted problems) and use PR to encourage you to use them ("best practices" and so on) in all the cloud-hosted shops I've been in a decade of experience I've always seen multiple full-time infra people being busy with... something?

There was always something to do, whether to keep up with cloud provider changes/deprecations, implementing the latest "best practice", debugging distributed systems failures or self-inflicted problems and so on. I'm sure career/resume polishing incentives are at play here too - the employee wants the system to require their input otherwise their job is no longer needed.

Maybe in a perfect world you can indeed use cloud-hosted services to reduce/eliminate dedicated staff, but in practice I've never seen anything but solo founders actually achieve that.

Exactly. Companies with cloud infra often still have to hire infra people or even an infra team, but that team will be smaller than if they were self-hosting everything, in some cases radically smaller.

I love self-hosting stuff and even have a bias towards it, but the cost/time tradeoff is more complex than most people think.