Have you done any calculations as to what it would cost to rent say, 20 x $100 a month dedicated servers spread across multiple datacenters, that can do virtualization with OpenVZ, Xen, or KVM (takes care of network, power, bandwidth, hardware issues) vs. what you spend monthly with AWS? Bluntly it seems like you must have spent some dev or ops time learning all this and migrating away from EBS etc. even if you didn'…
And you can find essays of people who run their own rack who swear the same thing about moving to AWS.
I worked at an all-AWS bay area startup that ran a $100k/mo Amazon bill, and now I work at a bay area startup that runs all its own hardware.
It's about tradeoffs. It's not just about cost. (Though there are many cases where Amazon is cheaper and it has little to do with your monthly spend, and certainly not an arbitrary threshold like $3k/mo.)
Writing this at the close of my employer's Open Enrollment period, I'd say this: Comparing AWS with running your own hardware is like trying to compare two health insurance plans. Each brings its own seemingly impossible tradeoffs. All you can do is bring your experience and judgment to identify core issues, make the best call you can, and suppress the urge to dream of the road not taken when you're knee deep in whatever hell you're experiencing that would be a non-issue if only you had went the other way.
Though if you loathe the AWS "fanboyism" so much then maybe it's the company you're keeping: Few currencies in a startup are as valuable as flexibility. The younger the startup, the truer that is.