This. AWS support is wildly expensive. I actually encourage most companies to find a smaller partner with strong infrastructure for this exact reason.
You can get this Business Support for free a year if you join StartupSchool and get 3K USD credits with the business support.
If you can't afford it, maybe you are just hobbying around but AWS offers lots of ways to support you until you have a substainable revenue.
I always hear people on the internet talking about AWS being crazy expensive, but from SFBA it looks really damn cheap. Would I rather give $thousands to AWS or $hundredthousands to an internal specialist who’s likely gonna say my company is too small and boring to keep them interested anyway?
AWS wind that math every day. And that’s the market they target. Why wouldnt they?
I LIKE AWS. I think it can be a great choice for many companies and use-cases. But the idea that AWS is firmly everyone, that it's less expensive for everyone when you factor in the TCO, simply isnt correct.
Correct. I specifically said it’s perfect if your labor cost is higher than your AWS cost
Another good case is indie hackers whose project likely won’t ever make it out of the free tier
For $1500/mo you can get half rack (5Kv) and 50 Mbps internet. A couple $5k switches and 6-8 10k servers and you're well under $125k, plus you probably don't need $10k servers or $5k switches and can find cheaper hosting. I realize you said a full rack, but that's probably overkill and could be done for $350k or less. Once you have the servers/switches your fixed costs are relatively low.
But for a business that requires cloud hosting with support? There aren't many places on the planet where $100 is a prohibitive cost for a business that's willing to spend at minimum that much for hosting.
In short, it's the cost of doing business.
Still, those $100 monthly we paid for aws support were worth their weight in gold.