Particularly at startups, it’s almost always more cost effective to hit that “scale up” button from our hosting provider than do any sort of actual system engineering.

Eventually, someone goes “hey we could save $$$$ by doing XYZ” so we send someone on a systems engineering journey for a week or two and cut our bill in half.

None of it really matters, though. We’re racing against competition and runway. A few days less runway isn’t going to break a startup. Not shipping as fast as reasonable will.