High per-unit costs lock you into certain workflows, and a lot of systems have much higher value at much larger scale. For example, think of the value generate

High per-unit costs lock you into certain workflows, and a lot of systems have much higher value at much larger scale. For example, think of the value generated from a fraud detection system that alerts you on a nightly batch job, vs. a fraud detection system that runs once per minute. If you're spending $20k/y on the batch job, you're never even going to consider the 1/min option. If you can decost sufficiently to run it 1/min, whole new market opportunities open up.