> Making yourself a subsided of Amazon was never wise
True, but the AWS pricing doesn't make sense otherwise. If you're not using the managed services, then the value proposition is no longer there. Using those services is what allows you to build massive systems for relatively cheap, with much less staff. We had a project that was to be moved from on-prem to Azure (same deal), it went from thousands of Euros per month to fitting into the a free-tier, but only because we could use managed services. Spinning up the same VMs would cost more than hosting it ourselves.