This paper argues that as startups mature into scaleups and public companies, their priorities shift from rapid growth to operational efficiency, governance, and cost control, and their cloud strategy must evolve accordingly. It explains how hyperscalers attract early-stage companies with easy onboarding, credits, and convenient proprietary services, but over time create lock-in and rising bills through premium PaaS dependencies, data egress and other fees, and reduced service attention as customers become captive. Citing industry reports, it highlights substantial cloud waste and budget overruns, plus examples of workload repatriation delivering significant savings. The paper recommends moving beyond a cloud versus no cloud debate to a workload-by-workload strategy that balances ownership

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