AWS is extraordinarily expensive when it comes to bandwidth pricing. The same could be applied to a car - it depends on your use case. Do you haul goods? Go in the mountains? Live out of a major city with poorly mapped roads?

Conversely, bulk buying saves money -- you buy toilet paper and paper towels in bulk, buy a bag of 20 lbs of rice instead of 2 lbs at a time, etc.

So it probably depends on the individual's financial situation and where a car ride falls in terms of buying bulk vs incrementally.

A lot of the expense about physical servers is also the maintenance and having employees' time to manage them. A car requires some maintenance but arguably less so than that, so perhaps not the closest comparison.

> Why buy a 10-100k car when you can pay the incrementally per use?

Because it's cheaper over the long run.