This cannot be emphasized enough. The top of the line configuration you can get today is a dual EPYC 9654. That nets you 384 logical cores, up to 12 TB of RAM, and enough PCIe lanes to install ~40 NVMe drives, which yields 320 TB of storage if we assume 8 TB per drive. All for a price that is comparable to a FAANG engineer's salary.
And you're missing one little thing - if you get all of your processing on two of those, you save way more than 4 engineers salaries in development/maintenance costs.
Let alone - AWS Lets you get that machine for less than a junior engineer salary ($7.5 per hour, roughly equivalent to $32 of hourly wage = $67k)
