You're seriously underestimating how much it costs. $750/day is probably low-balling it for anywhere in the country if you also count hiring costs/employee turnaround and training costs.

Also, for the skills implied, have you ever tried to hire a systems administrator who has experience in production environments with all of those aspects of back-end web servers? It's not easy, and it's not cheap.

I have, uh, pretty convincing evidence that $750/day is in the ballpark for the fully-loaded cost of a devops engineer in Boston. It certainly doesn't buy two days of an engineer in Boston.

But Boston is Boston, and SV is SV, and this is estimation, so I'll happily concede a factor of two. Okay. Suppose $750 buys you two engineer-days per month. Same question: Is the $750 important?