Should I use Adobe Commerce Cloud Sydney or self-host on AWS Sydney?

Adobe Commerce Cloud (Sydney region) — managed Magento, Adobe handles patches / upgrades / Fastly CDN / New Relic. Best for stores doing > A$5M/yr that want zero infra burden. Costs A$1,500 – A$5,000+/month depending on tier. Lock-in to Adobe’s deploy flow (ECE-Tools). Self-host on AWS Sydney (or Cloudways Sydney / MyHost / BigCloud) — cheaper (A$200 – A$1,500/month), full control, can use any Magento version / extension. Best for stores doing < A$5M/yr or technical teams that want flexibility. Trade-off: you (or we) own patches / upgrades / CDN / monitoring. Recommendation: under A$3M/yr revenue — AWS Sydney + Cloudways for managed-VPS comfort. Over A$5M/yr — Adobe Commerce Cloud Sydney is worth the price for the SLA + Fastly + auto-scaling. We’ve migrated stores both directions.