That makes sense with yesterday's low interest rate and high VC investment, sure, and for startups that are VC funded so have cash to burn.

But we're entering leaner times. Many younger people haven't been through this before. Others may not remember. Investors are going to demand more responsible spending, and better balance books, sooner.

If you can start on a shoestring and hold on until you need to scale, you have an advantage in this market that you didn't have 5 years ago.

That and a lot of the cloud stuff comes with an inherent complexity. Architecting for cloud hosted K8 and various cloud services comes not only with a $$ cost but a software architecture complexity & labour overhead.

A single server can do a lot these days. Many many businesses think they need to scale out of the box a lot more than they do.