The "Platform Tax" Is Real - Why Developers Are Moving Back to AWS (2026)

There's a phrase we keep hearing in founder Slack groups, Reddit threads, and Twitter conversations about infrastructure costs. It comes up when someone posts their monthly Vercel bill, or when a seed-stage startup realizes they're spending $400/month on Railway for a workload that would cost $120 on AWS. The phrase is: "The Platform Tax." It's not an official term. No pricing page calls it that. But every developer who's outgrown a PaaS platform knows exactly what it means — the premium you pay