Comparing consulting bills to IaaS bills is apples/oranges. Consultants are really just Humans as a Service (HaaS). A lot of the work we do is to bring in expertise in something that would otherwise be difficult and expensive to hire for and augment a team for a short period. We actually help customers with cloud-stuff (like AWS and Azure) all the time.
A lot of the work I've been doing lately is stuff that would have to be done if you were using K8s on cloud instead of OpenShift. I'm currently helping to migrate services from older platforms (like BlueMix) to OpenShift. You can look for that "feature" all day long in the cloud console, but you won't find it :-)
I'm also a freelance consultant mainly focused on OpenShift and k8s, my bill is separate.
If I see the support contract bills of my clients,
holy crap, you could host a ton of stuff on GCP
for that.
on a more serious note: in order to compare apples to apples you should compare red hat support bills with GCP support bills (i think they call that "professional services"). I guess they aren't cheap either.
Sadly, also my experience. Response SLA of 2 hours? Please attach sosreport is ALWAYS the first reply. Even if you attached it in the original ticket (which we always do). The technical quality of the support is sub-par, most of the time when we include technical information, they don't seem to understand it at all...
I think you underestimate the revenue OpenShift is generating... If I see the support contract bills of my clients, holy crap, you could host a ton of stuff on GCP for that.