Spot on. S3stat pays my rent, even though I link straight from the site to a set of detailed instructions to roll your own version of the service.
If you have a dozen hours to follow those instructions, debug and get it up and running as a scheduled task on one of your servers, you can get it for "free". Or you can pay me $5/month to do it for you.
Assuming you'll use the end result for one year, your break-even point comes when you value your time at about $5/hr. If you think you're worth less than that, you'll do it yourself. If you think you're worth more, you'll buy it.
People with more money than time will happily trade one for the other.
S3Stat looks cool and I myself might be using that in the future. However, usually it is not simply time vs money as you say. Using prepackaged software is a dead end. You can't do anything further with it. You usually don't learn anything that will give you an idea for doing something else. It may be just a time vs money trade-off for non-developers but the equation is different for developers. Fun and learning opportunities come into play.
If you have a dozen hours to follow those instructions, debug and get it up and running as a scheduled task on one of your servers, you can get it for "free". Or you can pay me $5/month to do it for you.
Assuming you'll use the end result for one year, your break-even point comes when you value your time at about $5/hr. If you think you're worth less than that, you'll do it yourself. If you think you're worth more, you'll buy it.
People with more money than time will happily trade one for the other.