You don&#x27;t get an engineer in my model: you usually share one with others. Someone who throws together this stuff all the time usually has premade images, scripts, checklists, etc that make it very efficient. You become one of their many customers. This might be a person or a firm. It&#x27;s just one that focuses on great cost-benefit as differentiator.<p>So, one $30-50k engineer gets split 5-10 ways on infrastructure. Most maintenance is automated with setup and occasionally fixing something using up most time. You usually negotiate 1 day to a week of dedicated time out of the month w&#x2F; split being flexible.<p>Heroku and Redis might still come out a better deal. It&#x27;s just not going to be nearly as different as people think because one doesn&#x27;t have to load-up on IT people to deploy or maintain common configurations. All kinds of consultants and smaller fish that will do it way cheaper [than you mentioned] with cost spread across multiple, small businesses.