For company hosting cloud solutions gets you the various compliance stuff for free which can be worth it if you're not too large, and of course faster turnaround if you need to get a product out.
For personal a cheap vps will end up costing around the same as something you can do on your own, without the risk of messing up your machine/network from a vulnerable endpont
This is really it: compliance. The cost is in having to prove that you did the right things. But I do wonder if we will see an easier path forward with that. After all if there was a way to pay someone a once a year fee for an audit and filling out the paperwork and the cost was lower than the cost of using AWS then surely people would do that and it is an opportunity for an audit business that is willing to work with self-hosted setups. Or just have GPT-5 fill out the compliance docs. I suspect it won’t be long until GPT-5 is reading them.
I'll admit, bit of a poor choice of word,l. But when you need to do e.g. physical security, costs add up quickly over what you'd spend on cloud in say a year, and the compliance companies are usually a huge headache to deal with so that'll be some nice amount of your staff's time lost
For personal a cheap vps will end up costing around the same as something you can do on your own, without the risk of messing up your machine/network from a vulnerable endpont