Exactly. AWS only has one way to go and that is down. Many companies are realizing that cloud is not all it is cracked up to be and moving back to onpremise. You can Colocate for 1/10th of what you pay for AWS and as soon as you reach a size where you are paying over $1k a month in AWS fees it is worth thinking about self-hosting and paying a few hours for maintenance from some IT company in your area. AWS would need to lower fees tremendously to be competitive or they will lose many of their bigger customers.

I feel that system lock in has been their saving grace for years, but as trends change, the rate of new customer acquisition will slow and therefore fewer people to fall into their trap. When people are only staying your customers to avoid the massive bill for moving their data out of your data center, that is not a recipe for success. It can literally cost 100s of thousands to transfer your data out, in addition to the costs of switching to a new system, so many companies want to avoid the large hit on a single quarterly report.

I have done the math and in some cases you are literally paying more in fees each month than it costs to buy the hardware outright. Remote hands from any decent hosting company costs under $150 an hour and I spend about 2 hours a month doing server maintenance for our servers. You can literally spend $5-7k upfront and buy your own server, colocate that for $100-200 in a datacenter instead of paying $2k to Amazon a month who also takes a huge payment upfront for the hardware. It doesn't take long until it makes sense to hire someone to take care of it in house and still save money over Amazon.