Commodities are priced at cost plus.
Differentiated goods are priced based on value delivered.
I prefer “perceived utility” rather than “value delivered”.
“value delivered”: same as RHEL
“perceived utility”: a path to RHEL subscription
Since the second is not true anymore for IBM, centos was converted to be less of a threat to RHEL by decreasing its delivered value, and offering a 'new' utility: kind of work like RHEL but please pay to get the full RHEL experience.
If I’m having my house painted I will have many vendors willing to do the work at very different prices. It’s not a commodity since I have quality expectations and vendors have different levels of experience, skill and diligence. I know how much the paint, other consumables and equipment costs, so if they quote low or high on that I can take it into account. I can figure out what portion is labor, and conclude what level of skilled folks they’ll use. I can ballpark their profit and make sure it is in line with my values (I want them to have a successful business if they do good work, I don’t want to pay for a shiny new lifted F-350 4x4 dually Cummins diesel crime against humanity).
Maybe it’s just me.
The price of the iphone is a good example. All the costs that you name exist, but they are completely irrelevant. Apple sells the iPhone for a thousand dollars because enough people still buy them at that price.