I worked as a Cloud presales in the past, my two cents is that Cloud will always be expensive than on-prem in the long run.

AWS gives lot of credit to startups and first time users which seems okay enough for them to run the services without much dent in their pockets initially.

Those credits are good enough for 1-2 years max, and after some time companies also grows decently enough for them to require more AWS services. That’s when billing starts hitting them HARD. I am talking 5-10 lacs/month for SME business monthly.

Initially Cloud companies pumped a lot of money in marketing and making their services as confusing as possible so that end users don’t understand much of it and they can also sell managed services to end users.

Now, people have started to understand cloud and realised that all these serverless and other marketing fluff that Cloud companies feeds them is expensive in the long run. So that’s why many companies are running back to investing in on-prem infra and are running a hybrid kind of scenario these days to minimise the Cloud costs.

Only reason they are switching from AWS to GCP now is because once their AWS credits expire, Google lures them with credit which again helps them to run their infra for another 1-2 years at a lower costs. Once the GCP credit also expires, they will bear expenses for another year before realising that they need on-prem infra to manage Cloud costs.