While I appreciate the analysis, the perspective this whole blog post takes misses the mark on how AWS provides value. You can't look at it simply as providing commodity computation and storage.

As a solo SAAS founder, I use AWS because of all the other services that surround those offerings (Cognito for user management, DynamoDB for database, Serverless stack for API, SES, SQS, Route53, ECS, I could go on for a while) provide a huge amount of value for me in terms of not having to fully set up and maintain that functionality myself. I pay next to nothing for these services and the developer and devops hours saved is worth many thousands of $ to me. However, because of this reliance, I then end up knowingly overpaying for storage, computation, and bandwidth (the latter is by far the biggest concern, the former 2 are fairly minor, so I'm looking at alternative CDN providers). However, other than that, even though my AWS bill is the biggest my SAAS has, I happily pay it. There would be almost no way for me to run this thing solo without it (I'm not saying someone else couldn't, just for me).