Comment by xmprt

I always figured it was the other way around. When you're small it's pretty easy to get by with a stupidly simple solution but as you grow you end up needing to spend much more to build something scalable and at that point, using the cloud makes sense. The biggest success that cloud providers have had is convincing users that they need to spend $100k and that a much simpler $5k solution that's built using off the shelf components just won't cut it.