Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

Not free, it became a productivity boost.

You now have a $35k annual budget for the maintenance, other overhead, and lost productivity. What do you spend it on?

> The team also took on responsibility for server monitoring, security updates, and handling any infrastructure issues themselves

For a place that’s paying devs $150k a year that might math out. It absolutely does not for places paying devs $250k+ a year.

One of the great frustrations of my mid career is how often people tried to bargain for more speed by throwing developers at my already late project when what would have actually helped almost immediately was more hardware and tooling. But that didn’t build my boss’ or his bosses’ empires. Don’t give me a $150k employee to train, give me $30k in servers.

Absolutely no surprise at all when devs were complicit with Cloud migrations because now you could ask forgiveness instead of permission for more hardware.

But I've migrated plenty of companies off custom deployment setups to PAAS and told many ceo's simply what OP above has shared. Even a part time dev ops engineer is still $60000 a year, and that can buy us a LOT on PAAS. Using PAAS you can have effectively zero dev ops, I've also trained non technical people on how to scale their own servers if no devs are around because you just have a web based UI slider.

I consider myself a developer who cares more about the business, risk, profits and runway. A lot of developers don't share this mentality (which is fine btw always need engineers who like engineering for engineering sakes) but in meetings you will have a hard time beating me in an argument if you try to say that running servers ourselves would be "cheaper", and/or even faster, safer and definitely not more stable. (obviously not in all situations, but kind of most for modern crud web apps that don't require complicated compute setups)

I'm probably being overly antagonistic, forgive me for that, though highly recommend questioning the real cost of running your own setups.