I’ve done the on prem design. I’ve migrated people entirely to the cloud. I specialize a little in between.
Without any shred of doubt the cloud is going to be more cost effective than self hosting for 99% of all use cases. They’re priced that way intentionally. You cannot compete with Cloudflare/AWS/GCP/Vultr/Akami/Digital Ocean/etc.
My homelab isn’t about scaling, production workloads and definitely isn’t accessible to anyone but me. I’d argue using it in any other way defeats the purpose and shows a lack of understanding.
If you’re doing actual big compute its cheaper in the cloud. Considerably. It’s also very easy and cheap to store lots of data. You will never be able to compete with their price for storage so I have no idea why you think that would be true.