I believe you are right, but no tin foil hat theory needed just sound pricing strategy. Eg. factor in underutilization but also refunds. For a flat rate, a price point at 70% of total value of included volume still is better bottom line if you set included volume high enough that the average usage is 50%, yet it still feels more generous and less risky from customer point of view. OTOH very granular unit pricing lets everyone underestimate total costs and complicates comparison with competing offers, „bread and butter“ product prices mask more uncommon ones, etc. In IT underutilization is high, also on own infra, that’s something cloud vendors (and hardware and software vendors) can rely on. Paying for it at least incentivizes to improve utilization, autoscaling is better, sometimes the cloud vendor does it for you, sometimes you have to donitnyourself. In IT laziness is rampant, time is often seen as more valuable than cash out. Also someting the vendors can rely on. I‘ve seen a howto for Azure for a scalable LLM API Gateway. It cost me almost 2 hours to get an estimate for min costs - with default values it would have cost almost 10k per month, I could size it down to less than 1k. A simple loadbalanced reverse proxy on vms cost less than 400. Be especially cautious when everyone is in a hurry. The pre-made solutions may try to cash in on that. Over all: Pricing and pricing models are part of the product properties you buy, and looking for and dealing with psychological pricing strategies and tactics is part of doing business.