If you're running databases continuously, I find a lot of their original unique selling point pretty moot, especially if you're paying them extra for it.
The bullet I quoted makes it seem like you feel punished for having to pay more because you used more resources. That's, like, the fundamental idea of usage-based pricing. If you feel punished, it seems as though you misunderstood the whole idea.
I'll reiterate that it's not the only reason why I'm moving off of them. Reliability, performance, insights, etc.
It just happens to be a lot more affordable too.
If you have a constant base load of requests, lambda is just the wrong tool for the job.
But I think for large workloads with unpredictable requirements, the capacity planning alone in a perm setup is a nightmare for most early-stage businesses. Spinning up an extra hundred instances in EC2 takes minutes - getting the same number of boxes installed a colocation facility takes weeks at best