About a year ago, I was in a meeting with my new CEO (who had acquired my company). My side of the business had kept hardware in-house, his was in AWS. We had broadly similar businesses in the same industry and with the same kind of customers.
My side of the business needed to upgrade our 5+ year old hardware. The quote came to $100K; the CEO freaked out. I asked him how much he spent on AWS?
The answer was that they spent $30K per month on AWS.
The kicker is that we managed 10x as many customers as they did, our devops team was half the size, and we were rolling out continuous deployment while they were still struggling to automated upgrades. Our deployment environment is also far less complicated than theirs because there isn't a complex infrastructure stack sitting in front of our deployment stack.
There was literally no dimension on which AWS was better than our on-prem deployment, and as far as I was able to tell before I quit, the only reason they used AWS was because everyone else was doing it.