It also means that when an application reaches a certain maturity or complexity, they have to leave platforms like Render to clouds where they can do the things they need to operate with efficiency. There is a tradeoff point. Platforms like Render are small team efficient, clouds are organization efficient
This is the narrative we disagree with most people on and are focused on disproving: multiple unicorns have started and stayed on Render, and our platform continues to add capabilities as their needs become more complex.
Exceptions to the rule (some unicorns, a crude measure for tech needs) do not break the rule. If anything, the trend is shifting back to self-hosting instead of running on any vendor.
If you add the same capabilities you end up becoming the cloud provider concept you wish to "disprove", and I would posit that feature creep reinforces the concept
A lot of apps never grow to that size, and can run on services like render or heroku forever, saving millions of dollars in devops cost (the most expensive part of devops is the devops engineer).
A good number of companies out there move to google scale infrastructure and spin up whole devops teams when they would be fine without all that out of fear of having to move later. That later might never come.
A good devops engineer or team will pay for itself, so it becomes an asset rather than a liability. A certain amount of scale or complexity forms a baseline. I get consulting / contracting gigs for this very reason, granted what I do goes beyond just cloud infra & costs, devops/dx as a philosophy rather than a job title. It is valuable to an organization to have some(one|people) thinking about these problems from a global & holistic view
