> Scaling a monolith is almost always cheaper 
    than migrating to microservices and scaling that.

    No - it depends on capacity needs and current 
    architecture.

It does depend, but a monolith of any nontrivial size is going to require hundreds if not many thousands of hours of engineer time. That's a lot of money right there. IME often the experience comes down to something like $250K of engineer time vs. maybe $2K/month of server capacity.

Again, though: it does depend.