But people do in fact make their own small investments when they opt for one provider of a service or the other.

For a multi billion dollar infrastructure project, your capacity to contribute with either 50K or 50$ would still amount to less than a drop in a bucket. For a massive multi billion infrastructure project to succeed it would still rely on either a state actor or a very large number of investors, or, as is the case I'm making, a large amount customers.

If I opt for your company as my provider of a given service, and very large number of other people do too, we're enabling your company — via the pooling of our payments — for you to do further investments and improvements to your service.