It's an enterprise thing. I have seen these dynamics with database vendors: databases are sticky, clever license agreements. A commercial database vendor syste

It's an enterprise thing. I have seen these dynamics with database vendors: databases are sticky, clever license agreements. A commercial database vendor system gave us several free licenses (or cores or something like that) for their platform as part of a deal. Sounds good at first glance. But when you shut down an instance, that returns a license to the free pool. As a result, nobody has incentive to ever do this work. Indeed, if you did free up a license, one of your colleagues might notice and use it on another project. After all, it's free. The way that databases are commonly used, they become an informal API for communication between systems. One codebase writes an order to the database, another reads it, and another reports on it. Once you this situation, it is difficult to remove. That would require coordination between multiple teams, and it doesn't generate revenue. For a piece of software like this, it only needs to get in the door once.