I could have built in house solutions that deployed faster and better auditing in just a few weeks than what they paid hundreds of thousands in licensing fees and man hours to do the same job. Hell, I even pitched it and management said no.
Because management would have more work and responsibility with your solution.
> what they paid hundreds of thousands in licensing fees and man hours to do the same job
They spent shareholders money. So they don't care about costs. And what looks better in resume: a) managed one programmer b) two million dollars software system deployment
If these guys have created a start-up and payed with their own money, I guarantee they would have chosen your solution.
If they take IBM/Oracle/etc. and things go wrong? you call them. they fly over an exec you can beat up and all is fine.
If you really truly can just punt, sit back, and even get to say "I told you so" when the system/software/service in question doesn't work, that's great. But... in almost all cases I've experience, it was still 'my problem', I just had far less control over making it work.
Suppose you rent your home and a plumbing problem leads to flooding and damage of some of your possessions. You take it up with the landlord and are credited two weeks' rent as compensation. Do you care about the specifics of the plumbing problem or the landlord's dealings with whatever plumber installed the system which later failed? Even if the plumber who turns up the house to fix the problem goes into detail about a previous plumber's ill-considered decision to apply PVC adhesive to ABS pipe, chances are that your interest is purely superficial.
And turning it around, if a plumber told me "hey, I'm not allowed to replace this outdated hazardous inefficient $pipeSystemX"... yeah, I'd want to get in to some details.