6 staging servers: main, dev, and any branches that you want to let other (non tech people) QA.

As for the staging servers, for each deployment, it was a mix of Performance-M dynos, multiple Standard dynos, RabbitMQ, a database large enough, etc. - it adds up quickly.

Finally, Idealist serves ~100k users per day - behind the product is a lot of boring tech that makes it reliable & fast. :-)

you're telling me 100k people are looking for jobs in non-profits on your specific site daily? Are you sure you don't have a bot/scraper problem?

Honestly, 100k/day sounds low for Idealist. It's the go-to place for volunteer and non-profit work, which is quite a considerable market.

From what I read, they're using them as dev environments. Like running many services at once for a single developer to tie into. That's why they wanted multiple ones, one for each dev.

$3000/month = 36k/year

That's more than 1/3 of the cost of a developer there.

That will save you some week of a person's work to set things up and half-a-day every couple of months to keep it running. Rounding way up.

Yes, everyone forget to compute man-days in the cost calculation

This thinking definitely drives enterprise products, and is exactly what makes it hard for small companies. "You can pay a lot simply because you clearly can afford to" doesn't lead to great products, even if it often does lead to profitable companies.