When companies move to AWS, the conversation usually starts with the monthly bill. How much compute. How much storage. How much data transfer. These are real costs, but they are the tip of the iceberg.

The bigger cost — the one that rarely shows up on a spreadsheet — is the human cost of operating AWS internally. And most companies dramatically underestimate it.

The Costs Everyone Sees

The AWS invoice is transparent and detailed. You know exactly what you spend on EC2, RDS, S3, and data transfer. Finance can track it, allocate it, and forecast it.

This is the easy part. It is also, for most companies, less than half the total cost of running on AWS.

The Costs Nobody Budgets For

Hiring and Retaining DevOps Engineers

A senior DevOps or platform engineer in Europe costs between 80,000 and 120,000 EUR per year in salary alone. Add employer taxes, benefits, equipment, office space, training, and recruiting costs, and the fully loaded cost is typically 1.4 to 1.7x the base salary. Call it 130,000 to 200,000 EUR per person per year.

You need at least two for any meaningful coverage. Three to four for 24/7 operations. That is 400,000 to 800,000 EUR per year before they have written a single line of Terraform.

And that assumes you can hire them. The market for experienced AWS engineers is brutally competitive. The average time to fill a senior DevOps role is 3 to 5 months. During that gap, your existing team is stretched thin, technical debt accumulates, and the engineers you do have burn out faster — which makes the next hire even harder.

Tooling and Platform Costs

Running AWS well requires more than the AWS bill. A typical internal operations stack includes:

Monitoring and observability: Datadog, New Relic, or Grafana Cloud — 1,000 to 5,000 EUR/month depending on scale
Incident management: PagerDuty or Opsgenie — 500 to 1,500 EUR/month
Infrastructure as code: Terraform Cloud or Spacelift — 500 to 2,000 EUR/month
Security tooling: Vulnerability scanning, SIEM, compliance automation — 1,000 to 5,000 EUR/month
CI/CD infrastructure: Build runners, artifact storage, deployment tooling — 500 to 2,000 EUR/month

Total platform costs for a medium-sized operation: 40,000 to 150,000 EUR per year. These costs are often spread across different budget lines and never aggregated into a single “operations” number.

The On-Call Burden

On-call is the hidden tax on engineering teams that nobody likes to quantify.

When an engineer is on-call, their productivity on project work drops by an estimated 30 to 50 percent. They are context-switching between planned work and alerts, sleeping with their phone next to the bed, and mentally unavailable even during quiet periods. If you have three engineers rotating weekly on-call, that is roughly one full-time engineer’s worth of productive output lost to on-call readiness — even when nothing goes wrong.

When things do go wrong, the cost spikes. A significant production incident can consume 2 to 5 engineer-days in response, remediation, and post-mortem. If you have one serious incident per month, that is 24 to 60 engineer-days per year. At a fully loaded cost of 700 to 1,000 EUR per day, incidents alone cost 17,000 to 60,000 EUR per year.

And there is a human cost that does not fit on a spreadsheet. On-call burnout is a leading cause of attrition among infrastructure engineers. Replacing a departed engineer costs 50 to 100 percent of their annual salary in recruiting, onboarding, and lost productivity during the transition.

Opportunity Cost

This is the biggest hidden cost and the hardest to measure.

Every hour your engineering team spends on infrastructure operations is an hour they are not spending on your product. For a SaaS company, that means features not shipped, integrations not built, and revenue not captured.

Consider a concrete scenario: you have a three-person DevOps team. They spend roughly 60 percent of their time on operational maintenance — patching, monitoring, incident response, access management, compliance tasks. That is 1.8 full-time engineers worth of effort that produces zero product value. At a fully loaded cost of 150,000 EUR per person, you are spending 270,000 EUR per year on maintenance activities.

If those engineers were instead working on product infrastructure — building features, improving deployment velocity, reducing build times — the revenue impact could dwarf the cost savings.

Adding It Up: A TCO Example

Let us build a realistic total cost of ownership model for a mid-size SaaS company running on AWS with a monthly AWS bill of 30,000 EUR.

Cost Category	Annual Cost
AWS infrastructure	360,000 EUR
DevOps team (3 engineers, fully loaded)	450,000 EUR
Tooling and platforms	60,000 EUR
Productivity lost to on-call	105,000 EUR
Incident response costs	36,000 EUR
Recruiting (1 replacement per year)	40,000 EUR
Total cost of DIY operations	1,051,000 EUR

The AWS bill is only 34 percent of the total cost. The human side — hiring, tooling, on-call, and attrition — accounts for the other 66 percent.

When Does Outsourcing Make Financial Sense?

Managed AWS operations from a qualified partner typically costs between 5,000 and 15,000 EUR per month, depending on the scope and complexity of your environment. Call it 60,000 to 180,000 EUR per year.

Compare that to the 691,000 EUR per year in non-infrastructure costs from the example above. Even the high end of managed services pricing saves over 500,000 EUR annually — and that is before accounting for the cost optimization savings a good managed partner typically delivers (20 to 35 percent reduction in AWS spend).

Outsourcing makes strong financial sense when:

Your team is under 20 engineers. At this size, dedicating 2 to 3 engineers to operations is a significant percentage of your engineering capacity.
You need 24/7 coverage but cannot staff for it. Sustainable 24/7 on-call requires 4 to 5 engineers minimum. That is an expensive floor.
Your growth rate is high. Fast-growing companies cannot afford the 3-to-5-month lag to hire DevOps engineers. Managed partners provide instant capacity.
Infrastructure is not your core competency. If your product is a SaaS application, not an infrastructure platform, your engineers should be building product.

Building the Business Case

If you are presenting the managed services option to leadership, here is a framework:

Step 1: Calculate Your Current Fully Loaded Operations Cost

Include salaries (fully loaded), tooling, recruiting, training, and productivity losses from on-call. Most companies have never aggregated this number. The total is usually surprising.

Step 2: Get Managed Services Quotes

Get proposals from two to three qualified partners. Ensure the scope matches your current operational activities so the comparison is apples to apples.

Step 3: Model the Redeployment Value

What would your current DevOps engineers work on if they were not doing operational maintenance? Quantify the product impact in terms of features shipped, deployment velocity, or revenue acceleration.

Step 4: Present the Three-Year TCO

One-year comparisons are misleading because they do not capture the compounding effects of attrition and hiring cycles. A three-year model shows the true picture: managed services costs are predictable and flat, while internal team costs tend to escalate as you add headcount to cover turnover and growing complexity.

What Does Not Show Up in Any Spreadsheet

Beyond the numbers, there is a quality-of-life argument that matters for retention and culture. Engineering teams that are not burdened with operational toil are happier, more productive, and less likely to leave. That virtuous cycle — happier engineers, lower attrition, more product output — is the real ROI of managed operations.

The question is not “can we afford managed services?” The question is “can we afford to keep doing this ourselves?”

Remangu provides managed AWS operations that let engineering teams focus on product instead of infrastructure. If you want to see what the numbers look like for your organization, reach out for a cost analysis.

The True Cost of DIY AWS Operations