Calculating costs based on sticker price is sometimes misleading because there’s another variable: negotiated pricing, which can be much much lower than sticker

Calculating costs based on sticker price is sometimes misleading because there’s another variable: negotiated pricing, which can be much much lower than sticker prices, depending on your negotiating leverage. Different companies pay different prices for the same product. If you’ve ever worked at a big company or university (any place where you spend at scale), you’ll know you rarely pay sticker price. Software licensing is particularly elastic because it’s almost zero marginal cost. Raw cloud costs are largely a function of energy usage and amortized hardware costs — there’s a certain minimum you can’t go under but there remains a huge margin that is open to be negotiated on. Startups/individuals rarely even think about this because they rarely qualify. But big orgs with large spends do. You can get negotiated cloud pricing.