> abandon the entire cloud

I was never on cloud. I have a big home with fiber connection and some backup connectivity. Setting up new server is like $50/year in electricity. If project works I will sell it, and let new owner deal with cloud and scaling it up!

Just reading price list from cloud providers gives me a headache. We will charge you between X and Z, and hopefully you will not bankrupt on next bill. Also we may terminate services anytime for whatever reason.

> unicorn machine

If you have a specialized startup, that is 90% of your cost! Not some sort of unicorn single machine. If you can use consumer grade hardware without extra cost, that is major competitive advantage!

> VPNs and hybrid architectures

What is that? Do I have to study that? Seems like a major obstacle!

That unicorn machine had better not use unicorn data transfer. Transferring an average of 100Mbps from S3 to your unicorn? That will cost you $1-3k / mo depending on how you configure it and what tier you’re in. Never mind that buying the hardware to sustain these data rates at home or in the colo is so cheap as to not even be worth mentioning and can easily be done on 20-year-old gear.

Of course, those prices to rapidly up if you use serious data. Want to train your fancy ML model to draw cats based on your giant data set of customer cat photos stored on S3? Want to do it on your nice nVidia box at home? That, by itself, might cost as much as an expensive Silicon Valley FTE who could manage an entire installation in a colo facility nearby.

> VPNs and hybrid architectures exist for a reason.

And that's why the rent-seekers got that covered too by outrageous egress bandwidth fees, to ensure they still get their cut no matter what.