Services that are "trying to make a VC rich" are a double-edged sword. They are prone to "moving fast and breaking things", sudden business model pivots and dramatic pricing changes.
On the other hand, they are often heavily subsided by aforementioned VCs in the name of building momentum. So if you use them cautiously with all this in mind, you can often treat it as an informal piece of redistributative taxation.
Yes. Certainly. But it depends if the savings make it worth the extra hassle. The venn diagram must have a small overlap.
The other consideration is DX where these startup infras shine. They make it easy to deploy and that can be tempting. But I am not convinced it is that much easier. Learn the slightest amount of devops (a weekend) and you can script what they did for your usecase. Use github actions or whatever but not too much! Just get that to call a bash script that does what you want.
I think there is a lot of value of trying to keep off locked in paths. But it is a delicate path to tread. And for startups growth is everything. But a few seconds of thought into tech choices and not just jumping into every freemium shiny tech is probably a good idea.
On the other hand, they are often heavily subsided by aforementioned VCs in the name of building momentum. So if you use them cautiously with all this in mind, you can often treat it as an informal piece of redistributative taxation.