1. Startups use aws /digital ocean because its so easy and $5-10/month isn’t much
2. Startup or consultancy with traction: either you have too many projects or they start getting real traffic so the instances sizes and bandwidth / storage costs grow
3. Small company: You realize self hosting is probably cheaper and the machines are way faster self hosted
4. Medium size company: You self host and seem be saving money, but eventually you scale to need a team to support the infrastructure itself
5. Large company / enterprise: You go back to aws because the costs are high, but that is still preferable to having a bad version of aws written adhoc internally :)
For you it probably doesn’t matter as you’re probably 1-3 above. So it mostly depends on if you like managing infrastructure yourself. The cost savings are likely there, but only if it’s easy and fun for you to support it