alt Hacker News> you just need to design your infrastructure in a cloud-agnostic way
But that's one helluva "just", and also means that you can't use the platform-specific features that make life easier. In practice that's probably way more expensive than spinning some testing VPSes up and down.
On the other hand, can you afford not to? Those platform-specific features might look tempting at first, but in reality you are often mostly acquiring a bunch of very expensive technical debt.
If Amazon decides to throw the banhammer your way, how long will it take you to retool your stack onto another cloud platform? Will your company survive if all your services are offline for a few weeks?
And if you grow beyond the startup size, can you afford being locked to proprietary technology? What are you going to do if Amazon decides to increase your prices by 100%? How are you supposed to negotiate when Amazon knows you are unable to switch to another cloud provider?