FWIW, AWS is expensive... but mostly for networking and then second to that storage, with the cost for actual computation usually being a pretty small percentage of my overall spend. The only time I have seen computation itself be an interesting expense is when I am looking for some complicated hardware, such as their GPU or FPGA instances. That said, money is money... but it is much easier to figure out fun ways to save storage or bandwidth when the code is a bit more nimble, so I'm not sure I could justify larger teams or slower iteration times just to save on CPU.