Cloud services have a lot of competition.

I can choose Hetzner, which is a high quality low cost provider of basic cloud services. I can deploy open source options onto their cloud and push costs quite low.

The cost of cloud services has not soared. And companies like Cloudflare have continued to undercut AWS at every opportunity.

Oracle, Microsoft and Google all have strong incentive to hold AWS in check on what they can charge, and they do exactly that through rampant competition.

> Remember the time when cloud services made things cheaper

No. When was that? Cloud made things easier and faster not cheaper. You trade money for convenience.

As opposed to the traditional astronomically expensive public launches which haven’t had any real innovation since the 1960s?

The cloud services analogy isn’t a good one because it wasn’t mainly about cost. It’s about not having to deal with the logistics of a commodity layer.