Comparing cloud providers on instance pricing is easy and mostly beside the point. Two significant costs are absent from every price list.
Latency, compounded
A single request to a distant region is tolerable. Real applications make several per interaction, and the delays add. The effect shows up as measurable drop-off: users abandon slow flows, and the abandonment is attributed to the interface rather than the round trip. Anything conversational or real-time degrades first.
Support in a different working day
An incident at 10am in Lagos may land with a support team that has not started work. Response arrives in the afternoon, follow-up questions cross another night, and a problem that needed two exchanges takes two days. The invoice is unchanged; the outage is not.
What local infrastructure changes
- Round trips measured in single-digit or low double-digit milliseconds.
- Support inside your working hours, in your context, aware of local network conditions.
- Escalation paths that do not depend on a timezone handover.
Being fair about the trade
Established global providers offer service breadth and maturity a newer local platform will take time to match. The right question is which workloads genuinely need that breadth, and which are better served close to the people using them.