> Once you get to a certain size I think you can attract a team who can build out rather than buy in, and in so doing reduce costs.
I don't think this true for the vast majority of applications. It's probably true for the Youtube, Netflix, OneDrive, etc critical data path, but when your ownership is more like two dozen applications ranging from tiny (one consumer on some infrequent interval) to mid sized (under 100k requests a minute, for text, json, images, generated UI components), it's damn near impossible to beat from a pricing standpoint.
Going back to on prem servers, even doing kubernetes/docker orchestration would likely increase my current team's monthly capital expenditure from ~$14000 a month to somewhere in the realm of 50-60k a month. The sad thing about those prices are that our on prem offerings are very cheap compared to the last price I worked, a $BIGBANK that has multiple data centers in multiple countries. As an internal client with the same footprint we have now, $BIGBANK global infrastructure folks provisioning would take $90-110k and 6 to God even knows how many months depending on how fast you could get through the churn of governance, compliance, security, and controls.
Edit: just realized I forgot to mention I'm talking about serverless projects almost exclusively. That's important to the cost savings, because I agree that I'd rather host something in the 9 year old server in my basement and run my own reverse proxy than use EC2/EKS from a cost perspective.
