Server upgrade costs can vary wildly depending on what it entails. The cost of adjusting your EC2 Auto-Scaling Group maximum instance count will be very different than contacting HPE sales department.
At this point it seems that only mainframes can get more expensive than cloud auto-scaling.
But yeah, some places have a very expensive acquisition procedure. To the point that the labor in buying expensive things costs more than the thing itself. But those places "solve" the problem by buying large batches, and the hardware x developer costs comparison don't change much.
