[literalusername]

Sure, if the cost of infrastructure is taken to be a result of the requirement to replicate data. But given an infrastructure that is maintained irrespective of its use for data replication, replication is free. The former case may describe Amazon and Apple, but the later case describes pirates.

[anamax]

Using that infrastructure has incremental costs. Plus, building it to accomodate data replication in addition to other things costs more than just building it to accommodate those other things.