> OP wanted a thing. in the past, they've been OK paying $10k for similar things.

Okay, then their costs should have come down similarly, no? OP said they were a business and that these weren't luxury hobby things but business needs. In which case, it must reflect on the bottom line.

I operate as a business myself (self-employed), and I can generally correlate purchases with the bottom line almost immediately for some things (Jetbrains, VPSes for self-hosted git, etc) and correlate it with other things in the near future (certifications, conferences, etc).

The idea that "here is something I recently started paying a non-trivial amount for but it does not reflect on the bottom line" is a new and alien concept to me.

When people made studio ghibli versions of themselves for free, were they creating hundreds of dollars worth of value since that's how much it would've cost a freelancer to commission such a picture? I would say rather the value of the pictures themselves became very cheap.