Enterprise customers have a very different idea of what crazy expensive is... if this means we have to hire one less person to run ops, this is a cost savings.
GCP is scaling up a huge outside sales org (expensive). That means any propsect that's not an enterprise is not worth going after. Easy to weed out the medium and small businesses if you are upfront about a minimum 10k/month commitment.
I don't know – AWS has done fine with relatively transparent pricing. Telling folks you must spend $1,200 a year per vCPU for a software management layer seems ill conceived.
AWS runs a different sales model. They are much more balanced inside vs outside sales. They have inbound marketing and actively target businesses of all sizes. Inside sales is cheaper and can support smaller customers. I can tell you, AWS is not sending an experienced field rep to visit your one-man basement-built mobile app startup.
Like if you see that something costs $X, and you can only afford $Y, you might not even bother with it.
But if you talk with them they might be able to work within your budget.
But of course, when you do that, it's a clear sign you're targeting large clients/contracts, so your smaller customers won't want to bother with it.