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That's how I feel. Cloud services are great for anything that isn't losing money on each customer and then trying to make it up in volume :).

Cloud is way more expensive than other options, but I'm serving 5,000 customers for less than $100 a month, so spending more time to get that price down is definitely not the best use of my time.

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Is it? Cloud isn't apples to apples to other options because it covers both hardware and at least some if not most of your operations costs. The less magical your infrastructure, the more (very expensive) people are required to maintain it.

It really depends on your use case and requirements.

When you have a simple stack and reduced uptime requirements, getting something like 3 servers from a provider like Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-px) can give you a lote of compute power for little money.

Of course building something on top of GAE or AWS EBS / Lambda is a lot easier on the OPS side and gives you much more confidence, but at a much higher price.

Cloud is worth if you are in the range of $10-$200. Other that, there are better alternatives.

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