Being locked in to AWS (or GCP, or..) when costs are rising out of control is what I consider the opposite of freedom.
I was with one startup that went full-in on AWS features, so it was very difficult to migrate. Sure, we got started real quick, that was nice. I argued early on that we need to be careful of not getting locked in to AWS in case we need to jump away once we have some customer growth, but everyone else thought that was silly.
Fast forward two years and our AWS bill was about $2500 per year per customer. Revenue per customer, certainly nowhere near that. Burning VC money gets you far but only so far. Yes we ran out of money.
The reps from the major clouds constantly pester us to use their vendor-only features and we always politely have to say "no thanks".
We're up front about our multi-cloud strategy and only use the basic resources that are roughly equivalent/consistent between providers. We have the expertise to run whatever managed application they have ourselves and the engineers to build our own platforms.
Being locked in to AWS (or GCP, or..) when costs are rising out of control is what I consider the opposite of freedom.
I was with one startup that went full-in on AWS features, so it was very difficult to migrate. Sure, we got started real quick, that was nice. I argued early on that we need to be careful of not getting locked in to AWS in case we need to jump away once we have some customer growth, but everyone else thought that was silly.
Fast forward two years and our AWS bill was about $2500 per year per customer. Revenue per customer, certainly nowhere near that. Burning VC money gets you far but only so far. Yes we ran out of money.