I think it may be cheaper now though.
smart people cost a lot of money, having them on call at any time of the day or night costs even more money.
one of the interview questions i ask is "a customer calls in and said their system is unresponsive. what do you do?"
this will weed out a bullshitter 99% of the time, because the potential problem domain is the entire OSI stack, across the open internet, and also could be potentially on the customer side, which is most likely also a complex setup.
if you want someone who can actually fix the problem to help you, it's going to cost a lot of money. one of these people is six figures. now imagine a whole team of them, 3 shifts a day, every single day, forever.
Also I gave a poor example. I run a Es cluster so my thinking is at the point of my cluster is unavailable i know it's all red and it's not between my service and the endpoint.
if you feel that strongly about it, buy the support.