> I realized is that when you buy something like AWS, you're often paying for the platinum version, with redundant power, networking, etc, and not the bronze version, which a lot of people would settle for.

This is the difference in most cases.

Just taking availability as an example. Datadog has a 99.8% availability SLA. I suspect most companies would be fine paying for a 99% availability SLA, for example, at 1/4th the cost, but in most cases there's no way to scale down SLAs like that and launch a cheaper version.

There is a giant leap in cost (complexity, staffing, etc.) between 99% and 99.9% that most of these home grown solutions don't account for.

These nuances are lost in posts like these, and it is tiring.