Posted by ndhandala 10/29/2025
Very interesting that it extends into the digital space as well.
This really feels like it should be illegal, and if not, I’m not sure how there hasn’t been a massive revolt against them by people who make and sell things. If they are too big and powerful to revolt against, that sounds like a monopoly that needs to be broken up.
Note: edited the comment above to use "copy" instead of "clone" to be more accurate.
Am I just naive? How is a uptime SaaS product saving over a million year on managed colo vs AWS? Was every API route in it's own EC2 instance?
AWS is expensive sure, but over a million dollars a year? For this product specifically?.
I got some clarification from their earlier posts and it looks like they were intentionally avoiding any AWS platform features:
>Our goal was to avoid reliance on AWS or any proprietary cloud technology.
>When we were utilizing AWS, our setup consisted of a 28-node managed Kubernetes cluster. Each of these nodes was an m7a EC2 instance. With block storage and network fees included, our monthly bills amounted to $38,000+. This brought our annual expenditure to over $456,000+.
I just think if you are going to deploy on AWS, then treat it AWS like managed-colo, then your bill is going to be high. I understand how that seems unfair, but AWS isn't really in the business of selling virtual machines. If you sit down and ask yourself how you got here, it just seems like you committed yourself to wasting money. If I knew I just needed some linux boxes from the start, there are better choices than AWS.
Meanwhile, I've seen huge companies successfully complete cloud->cloud migrations in less than a year, as long as they use the value added services of the other cloud.
I think as AWS grows and changes the curve of the target audience is changing too. The value proposition is "You can get Cloud service without having a dedicated Cloud team," but there are caveats:
- AWS is complicated enough that you will still need a team to integrate against it. The abstractions are not free and the ones that are leaky will bite you without dedicated systems engineers to specialize in making it work with your company's goals.
- For small companies with little compute need, AWS is a good option. Beyond a certain scale... It is worth noting that big companies build their own datacenters, they don't rely on someone else's Cloud. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft don't run on each other.
- Recently, the cost model has likely changed if a company pokes their head up and runs the numbers, there's, uh, quite a few engineers with deep knowledge of how to build a scalable cloud infrastructure available to hire now for some reason. In fact, a savvy company keeping its ear to the ground can probably snap up some high-tier talent very soon (https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-target...).
It really depends on where your company's risk and cost models are. Running on someone else's cloud just isn't the only option.
The long term app model on the market model is shifting much more towards buying services vs renting infrastructure. It’s here where the AWS case falls apart with folks now buying Planet Scale vs RDS, buying DataBricks over the mess that AWS puts for for data lakes, working with model providers directly vs the headaches of Bedrock. The real long term threat is AWS continues to whiff on all the other stuff and gets reduced to a boring rent-a-server shop that market forces will drive to be very low margin.
Yes a lot of those 3rd party services will run on AWS but the future looks like folks renting servers from AWS at 7% gross margin and selling their value-add service on top at 60% gross margin.