In my mind, it&#x27;s like leasing a car. Leasing is better for your cash flow, but buying is usually a lower total cost.<p>Outside of large volume S3, it&#x27;s pretty trivial to beat AWS costs, assuming you have the human capability. S3 is a little different, as the capital investment required to host petabytes of data is very high, and Amazon&#x27;s economy of scale is pretty compelling.<p>For most anything else, dedicated boxes at a colo or your own datacenter should be cheaper, assuming you have the people around to do it, etc