> At scale (like comma.ai), it's probably cheaper. But until then it's a long term cost optimization with really high upfront capital expenditure and risk. Which means it doesn't make much sense for the majority of startup companies until they become late stage and their hosting cost actually becomes a big cost burden.

You rent a dataspace, which is OPEX not CAPEX, and you just lease the servers, which turns big CAPEX into monthly OPEX bill

Running your own DC is "we have two dozen racks of servers" endeavour, but even just renting DC space and buying servers is much cheaper than getting same level of performance from the cloud.

> This flips when you start getting into the multiple FTEs per month in cost for just the hosting. At that point you probably have additional cost measured in 5-10 FTE in staffing anyway to babysit all of that. So now you can talk about trading off some hosting FTEs for modest amount of extra staffing FTEs and make net gains.

YOU NEED THOSE PEOPLE TO MANAGE CLOUD TOO. That's what always get ignore in calculations, people go "oh, but we really need like 2-3 ops people to cover datacenter and have shifts on the on-call", but you need same thing for cloud too, it is just dumped on programmers/devops guys in the team rather than having separate staff.

We have few racks and the part related to hardware is small part of total workload, most of it is same as we would (and do for few cloud customers) in cloud, writing manifests for automation.