I've talked* to a number of bootstrapped and non-profit companies who are all-in on cloud and I think there are a few use-cases you're missing beyond just "we value dev velocity over cost savings." The biggest one is ease of scaling vs something like colocation. I talked to a non-profit with incredibly spiky traffic based around whenever they get mentioned in the news. Since every dollar matters for them, being able to scale down to a minimal infrastructure between spikes is key to their survival. Another company I talked to has traffic that's reliably 8x larger during US business hours vs night time and uses both autoscaling and on-demand services (dynamodb, aurora serverless) to pay ~1/3 of what they'd have to if they needed to keep that 8x capacity online all the time.
I agree that the velocity/cost tradeoff is one of the better reasons to go cloud, it's far from the only one, and it's certainly not the case that cloud is only for the price insensitive. If nothing else, the proliferation of cloud cost management tools shows plenty of companies care about their cloud spend.
* I work on an aws cost management tool and am doing a lot of customer research interviews this month.
> I talked to a non-profit with incredibly spiky traffic based around whenever they get mentioned in the news. Since every dollar matters for them, being able to scale down to a minimal infrastructure between spikes is key to their survival.
Frankly, I don't understand this point. For €40 a month with Hetzner you'll get an i7 with 64GB RAM and 2x512 SSD that will easily handle any traffic spike (we're talking about a website, right?). €40 is not a lot of money, even for a non profit, and especially for one experiencing a huge spike after being mentioned in the news.
On the contrary, I would advise against AWS here as they're completely unpredictable. You can be charged any amount, and the costs only partly depend on you. Developers have been demanding hard caps for over a decade to no avail.
My comment is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of cost/benefit for cloud use cases, but only examples for a thread with a half life of ~24 hours.
Please consider publishing your research findings in the future if it doesn't put you at a competitive disadvantage. A rising tide lifts all boats, and cloud spend tracking and modeling is a pain in the ass (as your success demonstrates).
I agree that the velocity/cost tradeoff is one of the better reasons to go cloud, it's far from the only one, and it's certainly not the case that cloud is only for the price insensitive. If nothing else, the proliferation of cloud cost management tools shows plenty of companies care about their cloud spend.
* I work on an aws cost management tool and am doing a lot of customer research interviews this month.