Two reasons for this stick out:
- Are the multi-million dollar SV seed rounds distorting what real business costs are? Counting dev salaries etc. (if there is at least one employee) it doesn't seem worth the effort to save $20k - i.e., 1/5 of a dev salary? But for a bootstrapped business $20k could definitely be existential.
- The important number would be the savings as percent of net revenue. Is the business suddenly 50% more profitable? Then it's definitely worth it. But in terms of thinking about positively growing ARR doing cost/benefit on dropping AWS vs. building a new (profitable) feature I could see why it might not make sense.
Edit to add: it's easy to offhand say "oh yeah easy, just get to $2M ARR instead of saving $20k- not a big deal" but of course in the real world it's not so simple and $20k is $20k. The prevalent SV mindset of just spending without thinking too much about profitability is totally delusional except for like 1 out of 10000 startups.