In my case (Experience with Azure Development), I definitely would use cloud infrastructure. Cloud providers abstract a lot of difficult things away, have ok-ish documentation and have a UI where I can easily find relevant information or do some debugging. With tooling I have more experience with I move away from the UI, but it's so easy just to get something up and running. The difficult thing is not getting each of these individual tools up and running, but handling the interactions between them and unfortunately I don't feel comfortable enough to do Networking, SSL, Postgres, Redis, VM management and building / hosting containers at the same time.
Costs in my case is not the highest priority: I can spend a month learning the ins and outs of a new tool, or can spend a few days learning the basics and host a managed version on a cloud provider. The cloud costs for applications at my scale are basically nothing compared to developer costs and time. In combination with LLMs who know a lot about the APIs of the large cloud providers, this allows me to focus on building a product instead of maintenance.
Costs in my case is not the highest priority: I can spend a month learning the ins and outs of a new tool, or can spend a few days learning the basics and host a managed version on a cloud provider. The cloud costs for applications at my scale are basically nothing compared to developer costs and time. In combination with LLMs who know a lot about the APIs of the large cloud providers, this allows me to focus on building a product instead of maintenance.