But then consider following hypothetical but possible scenario:

Sorry until you pay, no more Amazone services for your company.

Now you must move to a new cloud provider (or make a new company).

Oh, wait they now interchange (bad) customer information to better find fraud and you just got marked at "owning a lot to amazon" so no cloud for you anymore at any provider.

Now you want to buy your own hardware. So you need a credit from the bank, but dang, your owe to much to a big company and the bank now, so no credit for your company either.

While part of above's scenario is luckily not how reality currently works. But then who knows when (part of) such a horror scenario becomes reality.

In the end relaying on forcibly not paying back money you contractually own is just not a very viable strategy in my view.

I see no reason why such an arrangement couldn't be optional. Different projects, teams and people have different needs, cloud computing services are marketed specifically on this point. It makes no sense that there isn't even an option in Firebase or AWS to immediately stop services over a certain amount. The current a situation is ripe for lawsuits IMO.

> “Sorry, we don’t have the money” is a much better negotiating position than “can we please have our money back?”

I agree but why would you like to be in either position anyway? The so-called cloud services are terribly overpriced when compared to traditional servers.

Done correctly they save a lot of IT time.

Seem companies hire five 6 figure people to try and cut amazon bill by a couple of grand a month.

Never understood spending 50-100k a month to maybe save 5k

>Done correctly they save a lot of IT time

Not really, computing done correctly is about avoiding all of the pitfalls and finding ways to get zero cost benefits, free computation out of necessary redundancy, etc. Selling cloud computing is about creating options around every pitfall and finding ways to charge for every mitigation that will be necessary and charge for redundancy in the mitigation strategy for the mitigation strategy..

Even if you pay for all the redundant managed blah they offer to not lose your business by having any single point of technical failure in their network, their billing and IAM are your single points of failure, if you diversify to multiple clouds all the guarantees either cloud offers is now pointless redundancy so you are paying 10X pricing for an inadequate redundancy layer.

If you look at Google's own model for computing, they didn't fall for this themselves, the computers they used were intentionally unreliable to not recursively pay for reliability and redundancy at any layer that can't provide the needed guarantee.

You can basically go all in with one of these clouds and become a franchise add-on with roughly the same rights as your average mcdonald's store owner, or you are managing a strategy that is far more complex because of the complexity of these offerings than just using metal and free software.

They're very useful if you're testing a concept, need agile scaling of computational power, or are just starting a service and don't want to / can't invest the capital in dedicated hardware. I agree with you on your last point though, making your service entirely dependent on these services makes you little more than a franchise and is a potential vulnerability if you ever compete with any important existing service. It probably isn't a good idea for a mature or rapidly maturing business to rely heavily on these services.

It’s often a fixed vs ongoing cost question. Spending 200k to save 5k per month breaks even in 3.4 years.

However, for growing companies that 5k/month AWS premium can hit 200+k/month very quickly