Who said anything about being capital efficient? The point is that this article is all hyperbole trying to paint Google / Amazon / etc. as vultures who are just ruining startups. And my position is that those startups have to pay somebody for the services they're getting from AmaGoogFaceSoft, even if it means building the services from scratch themselves.
And when you balance all of that against the fact that AmaGooFaceSoft enables startups that probably couldn't even exist otherwise (due to large initial capital demands) it's ridiculous to say that those large vendors are somehow detrimental to startups in this regard.
I see this article as nothing but click-bait preying on the currently prevailing "woe is me, the sky is falling" negativity meme.
So Snap is paying Google $400MM USD / year or whatever... OK, now ask "how much would it cost Snap to build their own datacenter(s), host and manage their own services, provide electricity, cooling, etc..." It might or might not add up to the same as they're paying Google, but it would definitely be a significant chunk of money
