[hparadiz]

You forget the institutional inertia of how these things get negotiated from year to year. If something is working for people they tend to wanna keep it. The existing curation of how everything works is cheaper than rolling your own. Sure you can get something running yourself but integrations for a lot of people are worth some of this cost. Also for AI heavy customers (multimedia, video, etc) the sky is the limit and there's not enough processing for it right now.

[epolanski]

That logic works for 20 vs 40$ SaaS subscriptions, not for burning triple/four digits per day in APIs.