But really, if DIY, someone's got to actually have it meet SLOs and SLAs. So you need a person or two, which is when those hours add up.
These days housing and benefiting an employee can cost 50% to 100% overhead, depending on firm efficiency. So, $400/hr means $800k/yr (because 40 hrs x 50 weeks = rate x 2000) but half that can be considered overhead (recruiting, real estate, benefits, training, vacation, "management" when some number of headcount requires adding a lead or manager who is expensive overhead), so it's really 400k a year which is not out of line at firms with regulatory requirements.
Anyway, if your workload is critical, you can't have only one, so call it 2 at 200k. Point is, when all these things matter, GCP/Azure/AWS isn't the thing that stands out.
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> As the rest of your comment, personally, I see it more like a pitch to use AWS
Re AWS, I thought I was clear:
If YAGNI, don't choose it.
As the rest of your comment, personally, I see it more like a pitch to use AWS, rather than some conversion whether everyone really needs that enterprise tier. Me, I’d prefer to control as much of my infra as possible, rather than offloading it to others for an insane price tag.