Like OP, I was an AWS booster for many years (also a Heroku lover), but fell out of love about 10 years ago for the same reasons.

- It felt like far too much complexity just to do simple things.

- The obvious attempts to trap customers with slightly incompatible, higher level services felt gross

- The inability to run AWS trash on a dev machine had a MASSIVE hit on productivity

- Pricing didn't fall as fast as I felt it should (an obviously debatable position that reasonable, smart folks disagree with)

In my current company, we've been running basic SMB/tech startup functions on-prem (ACK! THE HORROR!) from ~6 basic computers (4 game machines and 2 nucs) for a few years now.

We just reconstituted the entire infra working part-time over about 2 weeks using Claude code and ansible.

It really doesn't make sense in this world to pay tens of thousands of dollars to rent a level of computation that can be purchased and managed for a tiny fraction of that money.

We're also seeing massive dividends paying out with this architecture because we have self-hosted gitea, along with a local workstation for our agents to run in, and now our agents have all of the context without us relying on Github or ingress/egress fees at all.

[edited for formatting only]