[derefr]

A business wants to pay (at least) what something costs, because 1. they’re making money themselves from the result, and 2. they don’t want the thing they depend on to stop being offered. You’re not a free rider per se if you want a cost-plus pricing model but it’s just not on offer. (In that case, it’s instead the provider’s fault for not capturing your value surplus.)l similar to how, in scalping, it’s the original seller’s fault for not charging what the market will bear.)

[ponow]

> similar to how, in scalping, it’s the original seller’s fault for not charging what the market will bear

Absolutely. Unfortunately, people hate scalpers, irrationally if you take a broad view.

[version_five]

Google's business model is exploiting people's data to sell advertising. If you use a google "product" that's not advertising, you're not paying what it costs, at least in money. In line with what you're saying, I want to compensate a cloud provider for their services in a way that makes me a customer instead of a vector for advertising or data exploitation.

[derefr]

Google Cloud, in fact, charges you what things cost (with markup, and economies of scale), just like AWS does. There are no loss-leader Google Cloud services. Google has separate b2b and b2c business models.

(I should know; we are a GCP customer, and we pay them quite a lot, in fact. They pinch every single penny, as they should. Nothing costs less than it would to do it on bare metal ourselves; we only save in CapEx in that we don’t have to pay ourselves for as many servers as are required to run something like e.g. reliable object storage, or BigQuery’s hot-idled compute.)

[XorNot]

The mistake you're making is thinking that paying them would mean they stop doing this. Why would they? You're not aware of how they're doing it now, why would money being involved change it unless there was a risk of you leaving the service?

The problem with advertising is that paying for a product just proves you have disposable cash to pay, which in turn makes you a more valuable advertising target.

Amazon, for example, aggressively monitor the types of services people are building that run on AWS, and then to launch competing products as "native" AWS services - knowing that to the rest of their customers, buying the "AWS native" thing is much more appealing then dealing with any 3rd party vendor.