$10/month difference is, to use your phrasing, absolutely nothing. It's not worth anyone's time to make that switch unless it's some toy app paid for out of pocket.

Most software businesses start off as "toy apps" and are paid for out of pocket.

The parent's comment is right - that is a lot of money for not a lot of value, particularly when you are early stage.

The trick is in finding balance between paying ridiculous fees (relative to your revenue/customer base) to make things more simple vs. find another way and spend your time instead.

A prime example are identify provider services, such as Auth0. The free tier is good enough for development, but as soon as you expect to onboard customers the free tier starts to feel deliberately gimped. Are you willing to spend $20 a month just to use a custom login domain? For the zero customers you have? $20 a month might feel like "nothing", but it's $20 a month forever and it's $20 a month that could be allocated to other things, such as compute or your accounting software.

It's not always that clear cut, however.

I think it is fairly clear. If you are building a product of passion that you may tinker with for years, by all means cut costs as much as possible.

If you are an actual early stage venture I don't believe those costs meet a high enough threshold to matter.

It depends, as things usually do.

$20 here, $10 there, eventually ends up as $600 monthly or more, and no customer anywhere in sight. That may, or may not be sustainable or make sense.

Flush with cash? Knock yourself out. Bootstrapping? You can spend that money a lot more effectively than just loading up on a bunch of overpriced SaaS products to make life easier. You have to earn the easy route by growing your revenue.

It does not depend though. It’s pretty clear that it’s how you value your time which is what I was getting to.

This math works if you're not paying salary.

When I read this message I think this an absolutely terrible waste of time for a startup/small company. I want to spend my time building features not infrastructure.

This stuff is so trivially easy these days. 20 years ago it was hard to deploy a clustered message queue application, but now we've got so much open source tooling. Are you telling me you can't deploy RabbitMQ in an afternoon? Give it a day or two and you've got a monitoring stack and some swanky GitOps. Now your OpEx has been reduced 80x for hardly doing anything. As for continual maintenance, us-east-1 has gone down more times in the past year than my RabbitMQ cluster has gone down in 5. Because the tech really has improved, and it really is easy now.

Depends if you value your time more than minimum wage. There is certainly a time and a place for everything but I don’t really feel like being responsible for something that costs the $N a month managed. Sure I could do it myself but my time is worth more.

When you think about it, ideally most managed services have found some natural price for their services that helps make the above logic work. And if it does not, it might be actually overpriced. I suspect a lot of folks that say roll your own are undervaluing their time.

You should also consider the value of being in total control of your infra. I value that immensely.

When we are talking about a $.50 a day message queue, no need to be in control.

If its a mission critical queue for the NYSE that has huge costs for downtime? Sure makes sense to be more in control as long as your control has a measured impact of less downtime.

Who wants to monitor and be oncall for a critical rabbitMQ service that someone only runs to save $15/month? Even if there's one outage it's already worth just paying for it.

Your time is worth more than the $0.34/day saved.