I don't think that's really a fair comparison. Like if you wanted to sell ball bearings you could spend $50 and start dripping lead into a bucket of water, or y

I don't think that's really a fair comparison. Like if you wanted to sell ball bearings you could spend $50 and start dripping lead into a bucket of water, or you could spend millions on a factory. The latter is definitely the better business model. What maters is quality of result (latency and tokens/s/user) and throughput per watt or capex dollar, not your minimum capex expense so long as you're running at any kind of scale.