Damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you don't go out of business in the early stages, you become powerless against the cloud provider you are now locked into upping their rent-extraction and draining you until you go out of business.
"Your margin is my opportunity." — Jeff Bezos
“We can save $100k/yr if we do this large rewrite” is much less attractive than “We can save $10M/yr. Please give us a team of X people to do so”.
I also don’t think your rent-extraction hypothesis holds. Despite some obvious call outs (like App Engine realizing it should have been charging for time you were blocking on I/O, not just cpu cycles retired, in 2011 when it went from Preview to GA), prices are generally stable or decreasing. Mostly, this is a function of hardware trends and competition: the cost per thread or per byte goes down over time. So you aren’t likely to be drained out of business by decisions the providers make. It’s totally possible that your cost structure never worked out, but that isn’t “upping their rent-extraction”.
Heck it charges for In use public ips attached to a GCE node. That was also a price increase.