> AWS is almost never cost efficient.

A ridiculous blanket statement, despite the "almost never" cop-out...

It is cost-efficient in a wide array of scenarios. Many companies pay for it because they have calculated the different investment scenarios and AWS comes on top of alternatives such as owning the hardware or using competing cloud vendors.

I own a consultancy that builds complex web apps and while I appreciate how occasionally a dev has tried to save costs for me by cramming every piece of the stack (web server, cache, db, queue, etc.), in a single Docker image to host in a droplet, I'd much rather pay for separate services, as I consider it cheaper in the long run.

Many companies pay for it because they have spent an inordinate amount of time learning the ecosystem and know of nothing else.

Name an AWS tier that there's no cheaper alternative for. I'm only aware of Glacier, I haven't seen anything cheaper than it.

AWS is convenient and reliable, but it's not cheap.

Cheap is a whole lot different than cost efficient.

Convenience and reliability are deeply related with cost efficiency - that’s the point the example I made was meant to illustrate.

> I consider it cheaper in the long run.

Really?

Yes, I charge $60-$90 per hour of dev time to my customers and the time saved from using simple Elastic Beanstalk deployments pays for itself in saved dev time. The architecture is also infinitely easier to reason about and scale than cramming parts in a single image.