I'm fully aware of opportunity costs, the investment was made because an investment needed to be made regardless to stand up 2-3 more servers. Doing so would have raised costs to perhaps $400/month if we simply copied existing setups (plus 2-3 days of work, probably, since we had not revisited CICD in over a year)

So by that, I've saved $5,000 in pure server costs. It probably cost me 10 extra man hours to do this way... But I also resolved a bug that was not terribly worth fixing before but took up 30 minutes of time every few months.. and improved the security by taking the servers off the public web.. however you want to quantify security improvements.

I always look at opportunity costs and the automation cost/benefit! The article was researched and written on my own time for my own enjoyment (so this was actually "free" from a business perspective, but my responses factored it in as if I did it as paid work. Just clarifying in case someone wants to claim I'm publishing "work"