[rwmj]

It's like asking why do people use Serviced Offices which are usually 10x the price of a monthly rented office. Answers: because they only need the office / VM for a few hours. Because they can immediately get an office / VM of any size they need. Because they can walk away from the office / VM when they don't need it any longer. It's certainly not for everyone, but Regus seem to be doing ok.

[vidarh]

And for those who truly only need it now and again, it's great.

But time and time again I see infrastructure where people pay for these services for large amount of instances that are running continuously, blindly assuming that it's cheap because it's cloud. There's a bizarre level of price-blindness amongst certain subset of customers of Google Cloud and AWS that I've never seen anywhere else.