We often hear that question about the trade off between quality and cost. The question is badly framed though. If it's low quality it's requires more effort to add or change features... and so it's more expensive mid-term (not even long term).

When you do the math, the cloud offerings look very expensive for most workload indeed.

Good exploration on how the total cost of ownership is spread depending on how is licensed the software you use and where you get your support from. I think there's one point a bit too glanced over in the analysis of the cost for the proprietary SaaS case: what's the cost of fixing a bug that affect your team? You might be a tiny fish in a large pond, good luck getting attention from support in this case.

Definitely this. One is more painful than the other though. It's a question of paying small price over tine vs paying a big cost later.

Interesting approximations to get a feel of how much a cloud project will cost.

The claim is huge. The story doesn't quite say how much is really about Elixir and how much from the revised architecture. That being said, going for something like Elixir has definitely an impact on the architecture... could it be that it pushes for better patterns?

This often overlooked indeed... and to make it worse it can be hard to optimize.

Interesting take. Will it lead to paying more attention to performance in software? Will it be the rise of the specialized CPUs? Time will tell.