This may be a naive question, but...

Cloud-first costs a lot of money. If your startup is doing something compute heavy, like ML or serving a lot of bandwidth, you're going to have to pay boatloads just to even serve low DAU.

I'll give an example:

Imagine you wanted to recreate some video upload/streaming app. Fastly charges $0.12/gb, AWS charges $0.05/gb (and this is me being generous, they only give you this rate after 150tb/month of volume).

1080p video uses about 25mb a minute. That means streaming a 5 minute video will use about 125mb of bandwidth, ~1/10th of a gigabyte, meaning just to stream a 5 minute 1080p video, at the bare minimum you have just spent $0.005. If this video gets 10,000 views, that is a $50 video.

I realize that's a fairly contrived scenario, and I'm going to be bombarded by people telling me X CDN offers Y bandwidth for cheaper or for much better price (spoiler alert: They don't. CDNs like Cloudflare actually don't allow dynamically generated user content or media).

I've rambled on my example enough. Bandwidth costs a lot of money, especially in the cloud world. But I'm sure I could setup some racks in various metros and pay way less than what I would have to on the cloud.

Whenever I see this mentioned on HN, people bring out their pitchforks. "But... Cloud is cheaper!!! Infra is cheap! Engineers are expensive!!" Yeah, I agree, in most scenarios, but there are some cases where cloud costs are just too ravaging to bear.

TLDR: The cloud-first culture is probably prohibiting a lot of startup ideas. I know I personally have not pursued some ideas just cause I know the infra costs would be gnarly. I don't think the next TikTok, YouTube, or whatever could be bootstrapped on the cloud, even with a $500k seed round, if you experience any volume of users that will be eaten away quickly.

user:	jsiaajdsdaa
created:	December 16, 2021
karma:	291