You know what the service costs, until the contract is up (or the contract can no longer be honored), and unless you do a cost calculation you won't know if you

You know what the service costs, until the contract is up (or the contract can no longer be honored), and unless you do a cost calculation you won't know if you're being gouged. Some people don't care about potential gouging if the price seems fair to them though. I would recommend all entities making purchasing decisions to do so based on some form of economic analysis (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_economics). The choice of a service contract vs anything else (which may involve other contracts, or may involve purchasing nothing) is the result of the analysis, not some broad sweeping bias. I also wouldn't mind seeing a prediction market for tracking how accurate analysis results tend to be.