[everforward]

The power company is almost entirely different; everywhere in the US I’m aware of caps utility profits so the “getting gouged” risk is literally illegal.

Commercial real estate leases are often for a long duration, also nullifying a lot of the gouging risk.

The downside of using S3 is that their billing model tends to create complexity around trying to use it as little as possible. Many projects will need to spend significant time on “how do we minimize S3 costs?”.

I would wager most consumers of S3 are not in the “has a high enough scale of data to have genuinely complex problems” crowd and would be basically fine with MinIO or any of the various on-premise storage vendors offering an S3 API.