The alternative is developer time. Nothing about managed services is ever less expensive if you don’t account for developer/Devops/netops time saved.
A small company has even more of reason to want as many managed services as possible. You can avoid hiring netops if you both have a third party managed service provider to manage your network and you have developers/architects who know enough to fill in the gaps.
On the other hand, netops staff costs are a lot less... is liquid the right word?
Yes, $200/month is probably not any more than a couple hours/month of even a very lowly paid developer or ops person, once you account for benefits and overhead.
But once you needed to hire that person for any reason... their annual salary is already on the books. Giving them more work to do doesn't affect your budget. But another $2400 a year might. Yeah, if you can avoid hiring that person _at all_... but you probably had some reason you did have to hire a person or three already, and now you've got them.
The actual experience of working in a small under-resourced organization, in my experience, often looks like this.
That’s why you don’t hire them at all. You use an MSP. Even if you do need someone on prem, the simpler you make your infrastructure, the less skilled your netops person has to be. You can hire someone who basically is a help desk person.
When that one netops person leaves, it usually falls on the developers to manage it.
Baremetal vs Cloud hosting -> resource for resource baremetal will almost always end up being cheaper.
The only way you save money on managed services is the cost of management. Meaning every hour that someone doesn't have to spend maintaining infrastructure is a cost savings to the business. Every minute saved by allowing someone else to do the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" is money saved.
A small company has even more of reason to want as many managed services as possible. You can avoid hiring netops if you both have a third party managed service provider to manage your network and you have developers/architects who know enough to fill in the gaps.