I work in cloud industry. Cloud has some big flat rate overhead that only goes away once you reach certain limit. If $1M budget is really something for a small company like prerender, than Cloud is usually not the answer as they likely will save a lot by rolling their own, and naturally cut corners in a lot of places to maintain a "agile, startup-like development speed": as a comparison, for most of our happy customers, 1M is really just a rounding error. I used to work in a team that has only three devs and we are happy with 3M/y cloud bill each year for our product alone, and that is not even a revenue generating product as it is for internal use only.

Cloud is in fact born to work for government as sort of public infra work. That is one of the primary reasons why google is losing the cloud war pretty badly.