I think the solution that you're paying for here is the burstable capacity. Dev teams often end up with a backlog of 100 internal requests, and all of them are

I think the solution that you're paying for here is the burstable capacity. Dev teams often end up with a backlog of 100 internal requests, and all of them are "the highest priority", well, if you have 1 thing doer and 100 things to do, they can't all be processed at once. But if you get 100 consultants, then they can do all 100 high priority items in parallel. The other edge of this sword, though, is that they want real money. Your manager is going to have to approve an expense report. Suddenly, it's actually possible to break the list down into actually high enough priority to pay 10x for, and just "nice to have". That said, I'm not sure it really helps. The infrastructure to allow these consultants to be productive is going to be expensive; the dev team has to provide a safe API for these integrations, and an API "that could be used for anything" is harder to design than writing code for a particular use case. (Then again, I bet a lot of these teams get a request like "can you just give us a read only replica of your database" and get "sure" back. It will be 1 year before they realize they just lost their SOC2 compliance and their website has been lying this whole time.)